Senior DevOps Engineer

Job Features

Job Description

Working for the Ministry of Defence but not as a military member?

If you choose a job at Defence, you choose socially relevant work. You truly contribute to a safe Netherlands.
In addition to approximately 53,000 professional soldiers and reservists, around 27,000 civilians also work at Defence. Do you want to contribute to a professional defence organization in your own field as a civilian, and thus to peace and security at home and abroad?

As a Senior DevOps Engineer, you will help build the technical foundation for Eagle: a service with which Defence employees use Search, Chat, and Artificial Intelligence. You will ensure that this service not only works, but is also secure, scalable, demonstrably reliable, and well manageable.

Eagle provides various services in the areas of search, translation, speech, and AI. You can see it as an internal conversational search engine (a kind of 'internal Google'). It helps employees make decisions quickly based on linked internal data sources. As a Senior DevOps Engineer, you will therefore look beyond a single application or deployment. You will oversee the entire technical chain and co-determine how Eagle is built, rolled out, monitored, and restored.

You combine hands-on engineering with technical direction. You will build yourself, but also ensure that the rest of the team can work according to clear and repeatable standards.

You will be involved in, among other things:

• Designing and improving Eagle's CI/CD, GitOps, release, and exception processes.
• Designing workload blueprints and product configuration for Eagle services on Kubernetes and OpenShift.
• Setting up observability and translating technical signals into usable SLIs, SLOs, alerts, and error budget information.
• Designing and testing redeploy, rebuild, restore, and failover mechanisms, so that recoverability not only exists on paper but demonstrably works.
• Leading complex technical incident analyses and structurally reducing disruptions and manual work.
• Monitoring and improving capacity, resource utilization, and the reliability of the technical environment.
• Strengthening security and reliability in the software supply chain, including through automated checks and verification of artifacts.
• Coaching engineers and increasing the technical maturity level of the team.
• Connecting the product team with architecture, platform, security, and the various Search, Chat, and AI specialisms.

You are therefore not only responsible for how something is built, but also for the question: how do we ensure that this will still work securely, reliably, and manageably in a year's time?

Job Requirements

You have demonstrable HBO or WO work and thinking level, developed through education, work experience, or a combination thereof. You also recognize yourself in the core aspects below:

• Extensive hands-on experience: with product-DevOps, DevSecOps, SRE, platform engineering, or production management automation.
• Strong delivery foundation: in CI/CD, declarative GitOps, Infrastructure as Code, version control, and immutable artifact promotion.
• Production-level Kubernetes/OpenShift: including deployments, RBAC/identity, network policies, probes, resources, and secrets.
• Security and reliability: with software supply chain controls, vulnerability management, observability, incident analysis, and demonstrable recovery.
• Technical leadership: you document choices in writing, influence without line management authority, and give and receive useful feedback.
• A growth mindset: you use incidents, delivery data, and new developments to continuously improve the system and working methods.

It would be a great advantage if you bring the following experience:

• Experience with on-premises, classified, or restricted environments and working across security zones.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana, Elastic, or a comparable observability stack.
• Knowledge of SLSA, Sigstore, policy-as-code, game days, disaster recovery, or AI/model-serving workloads.

Employment Conditions

Other Employment Conditions

• Defence strongly values personal growth and offers good study facilities, ensuring you are always developing. You will be given ample opportunity to develop yourself and grow.
• The grading depends on your education, knowledge, and relevant work experience. In addition to your salary, you build up an IKB (Individual Choice Budget) every month, which amounts to a total of 16.33% of your annual salary. You can use the IKB budget in various ways, such as buying leave hours or having them paid out.
• In addition to your salary and a pension scheme with ABP, you receive a monthly contribution for commuting or you can opt for a public transport subscription with unlimited travel throughout the Netherlands under favorable conditions.

A security screening (VGB) is part of the application process.

Special Provisions

• This vacancy is open to both internal and external candidates. In case of suitability, internal candidates have preference.
• A security screening is part of the selection procedure.
• A reference check and assessment may be part of the selection procedure.
• To be eligible for this position, you must be from a country within the European Economic Area. If not, you must possess a combined residence and work permit (GVVA).
• Acquisition is not appreciated. We kindly request that you do not send unsolicited offers, calls, or emails. Thank you for your understanding.

#LI-IS1 #LI-Hybrid

More about the Job Group

Organization Name

Ministry of Defence

Organization Description

Defence is committed to the interests, welfare, and freedom of the Netherlands. We are active daily both at home and abroad. Our global deployment strengthens international cooperation and ensures that people can develop freely. Now and in the future.

Approximately 79,000 people directly and indirectly work for the Ministry of Defence on peace and security. The ministry consists of the Materiel & IT Command (COMMIT), the Staff Directorate (the department), the Royal Netherlands Navy, the Royal Netherlands Army, the Royal Netherlands Air Force, the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee, and the Defence Support Command (DOSCO).

Defence is one of the largest employers in the Netherlands and exhibits similarities to a large corporation. The operational commands (sea, land, and air forces), the Marechaussee, DOSCO, and COMMIT are comparable to operating companies.

Organization URL

www.defensie.nl/organisatie/commit

Department Name

Command Materiel & IT

Department Description

You will be working at COMMIT (Command Materiel & IT), part of the Ministry of Defence. COMMIT ensures that the armed forces have the best materiel and the most reliable IT solutions. Together with national and international partners, including NATO and the EU, COMMIT works daily on the digital capabilities of Defence.

Within COMMIT, you will be part of the IT Management & Other Support (BOO IT) department. This department provides IT solutions that support Defence's business operations and is responsible for the development, implementation, and maintenance of applications and systems.

You will be part of a team of teams working together on the Eagle service. This includes platform management, ranking optimization, product management, and further development. The Eagle team is responsible for services in the areas of search, translation, speech, and AI.

Vision
The Materiel & IT Command (COMMIT) supports the transition to an information-driven and technologically advanced armed forces with the best materiel and IT. Our COMMITment is strong to strengthen the crucial role as a strategic partner of the Commander of the Armed Forces, the operational units, and international partners. COMMIT increases the impact of support through an integrated and innovative approach to materiel and IT projects, (weapon) system management, and chain logistics.

We invest in the quality of our people and the flexibility and diversity of the workforce. The most important capabilities of COMMIT are the knowledge and experience of our personnel. To equip the armed forces faster with materiel and IT, we focus on process and social innovation in project management, procurement, and disposal of defence materiel, and personnel and logistical support, in addition to technological innovation.

The execution of innovative projects requires more collaboration with the business sector, knowledge institutions, and other government organizations and societal entities. Under the banner of C-COMMIT as National Armaments Director (NAD), we also develop and strengthen international cooperation in the field of materiel and IT (NATO, EU, multinational, and bilateral).

Mission
COMMIT provides the armed forces with the best materiel and the best IT.

Extra
COMMIT is for everyone and by everyone; we are convinced that with a diverse and inclusive organization, we can best perform our task of connecting 'want' and 'can' when our personnel is a reflection of society. We therefore cordially invite you to apply for this position!

Department URL

www.defensie.nl/organisatie/COMMIT

Contact Persons

For more information about this vacancy:

Jelle van Munster Nelis, IT Manager
[email protected]
06 54247939

For more information about the application procedure:

Ivo Saft, Senior Recruiter
[email protected]

Working for the Ministry of Defence but not as a military member?

If you choose a job at Defence, you choose socially relevant work. You truly contribute to a safe Netherlands.
In addition to approximately 53,000 professional soldiers and reservists, around 27,000 civilians also work at Defence. Do you want to contribute to a professional defence organization in your own field as a civilian, and thus to peace and security at home and abroad?

As a Senior DevOps Engineer, you will help build the technical foundation for Eagle: a service with which Defence employees use Search, Chat, and Artificial Intelligence. You will ensure that this service not only works, but is also secure, scalable, demonstrably reliable, and well manageable.

Eagle provides various services in the areas of search, translation, speech, and AI. You can see it as an internal conversational search engine (a kind of 'internal Google'). It helps employees make decisions quickly based on linked internal data sources. As a Senior DevOps Engineer, you will therefore look beyond a single application or deployment. You will oversee the entire technical chain and co-determine how Eagle is built, rolled out, monitored, and restored.

You combine hands-on engineering with technical direction. You will build yourself, but also ensure that the rest of the team can work according to clear and repeatable standards.

You will be involved in, among other things:

• Designing and improving Eagle's CI/CD, GitOps, release, and exception processes.
• Designing workload blueprints and product configuration for Eagle services on Kubernetes and OpenShift.
• Setting up observability and translating technical signals into usable SLIs, SLOs, alerts, and error budget information.
• Designing and testing redeploy, rebuild, restore, and failover mechanisms, so that recoverability not only exists on paper but demonstrably works.
• Leading complex technical incident analyses and structurally reducing disruptions and manual work.
• Monitoring and improving capacity, resource utilization, and the reliability of the technical environment.
• Strengthening security and reliability in the software supply chain, including through automated checks and verification of artifacts.
• Coaching engineers and increasing the technical maturity level of the team.
• Connecting the product team with architecture, platform, security, and the various Search, Chat, and AI specialisms.

You are therefore not only responsible for how something is built, but also for the question: how do we ensure that this will still work securely, reliably, and manageably in a year's time?

• Defence strongly values personal growth and offers good study facilities, ensuring you are always developing. You will be given ample opportunity to develop yourself and grow.
• The grading depends on your education, knowledge, and relevant work experience. In addition to your salary, you build up an IKB (Individual Choice Budget) every month, which amounts to a total of 16.33% of your annual salary. You can use the IKB budget in various ways, such as buying leave hours or having them paid out.
• In addition to your salary and a pension scheme with ABP, you receive a monthly contribution for commuting or you can opt for a public transport subscription with unlimited travel throughout the Netherlands under favorable conditions.

A security screening (VGB) is part of the application process.

You have demonstrable HBO or WO work and thinking level, developed through education, work experience, or a combination thereof. You also recognize yourself in the core aspects below:

• Extensive hands-on experience: with product-DevOps, DevSecOps, SRE, platform engineering, or production management automation.
• Strong delivery foundation: in CI/CD, declarative GitOps, Infrastructure as Code, version control, and immutable artifact promotion.
• Production-level Kubernetes/OpenShift: including deployments, RBAC/identity, network policies, probes, resources, and secrets.
• Security and reliability: with software supply chain controls, vulnerability management, observability, incident analysis, and demonstrable recovery.
• Technical leadership: you document choices in writing, influence without line management authority, and give and receive useful feedback.
• A growth mindset: you use incidents, delivery data, and new developments to continuously improve the system and working methods.

It would be a great advantage if you bring the following experience:

• Experience with on-premises, classified, or restricted environments and working across security zones.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana, Elastic, or a comparable observability stack.
• Knowledge of SLSA, Sigstore, policy-as-code, game days, disaster recovery, or AI/model-serving workloads.

You will be working at COMMIT (Command Materiel & IT), part of the Ministry of Defence. COMMIT ensures that the armed forces have the best materiel and the most reliable IT solutions. Together with national and international partners, including NATO and the EU, COMMIT works daily on the digital capabilities of Defence.

Within COMMIT, you will be part of the IT Management & Other Support (BOO IT) department. This department provides IT solutions that support Defence's business operations and is responsible for the development, implementation, and maintenance of applications and systems.

You will be part of a team of teams working together on the Eagle service. This includes platform management, ranking optimization, product management, and further development. The Eagle team is responsible for services in the areas of search, translation, speech, and AI.

Vision
The Materiel & IT Command (COMMIT) supports the transition to an information-driven and technologically advanced armed forces with the best materiel and IT. Our COMMITment is strong to strengthen the crucial role as a strategic partner of the Commander of the Armed Forces, the operational units, and international partners. COMMIT increases the impact of support through an integrated and innovative approach to materiel and IT projects, (weapon) system management, and chain logistics.

We invest in the quality of our people and the flexibility and diversity of the workforce. The most important capabilities of COMMIT are the knowledge and experience of our personnel. To equip the armed forces faster with materiel and IT, we focus on process and social innovation in project management, procurement, and disposal of defence materiel, and personnel and logistical support, in addition to technological innovation.

The execution of innovative projects requires more collaboration with the business sector, knowledge institutions, and other government organizations and societal entities. Under the banner of C-COMMIT as National Armaments Director (NAD), we also develop and strengthen international cooperation in the field of materiel and IT (NATO, EU, multinational, and bilateral).

Mission
COMMIT provides the armed forces with the best materiel and the best IT.

Extra
COMMIT is for everyone and by everyone; we are convinced that with a diverse and inclusive organization, we can best perform our task of connecting 'want' and 'can' when our personnel is a reflection of society. We therefore cordially invite you to apply for this position!

Defence is committed to the interests, welfare, and freedom of the Netherlands. We are active daily both at home and abroad. Our global deployment strengthens international cooperation and ensures that people can develop freely. Now and in the future.

Approximately 79,000 people directly and indirectly work for the Ministry of Defence on peace and security. The ministry consists of the Materiel & IT Command (COMMIT), the Staff Directorate (the department), the Royal Netherlands Navy, the Royal Netherlands Army, the Royal Netherlands Air Force, the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee, and the Defence Support Command (DOSCO).

Defence is one of the largest employers in the Netherlands and exhibits similarities to a large corporation. The operational commands (sea, land, and air forces), the Marechaussee, DOSCO, and COMMIT are comparable to operating companies.

• This vacancy is open to both internal and external candidates. In case of suitability, internal candidates have preference.
• A security screening is part of the selection procedure.
• A reference check and assessment may be part of the selection procedure.
• To be eligible for this position, you must be from a country within the European Economic Area. If not, you must possess a combined residence and work permit (GVVA).
• Acquisition is not appreciated. We kindly request that you do not send unsolicited offers, calls, or emails. Thank you for your understanding.

#LI-IS1 #LI-Hybrid

For more information about this vacancy:

Jelle van Munster Nelis, IT Manager
[email protected]
06 54247939

For more information about the application procedure:

Ivo Saft, Senior Recruiter
[email protected]