DevSecOps Architect

Xcede • Contract • Remote (City of London, London, GB) • £650 / day • 3d ago

DevSecOps & Governance Architect
Location: London / Manchester – Mainly Remote
Contract: 4-6 months initial contract, with potential for extension
Clearance: Active SC Clearance required
Start: October 2026

We are looking for an experienced DevSecOps & Governance Architect to support a major enterprise technology transformation programme within a large UK public sector organisation.

This is a senior architecture role focused on helping define and establish an enterprise DevSecOps and platform capability, balancing strong security and governance requirements with developer productivity and practical engineering needs.

You will be responsible for defining target and transitional architectures, establishing governance frameworks and creating reusable technical patterns that can be adopted across multiple teams and domains.

You'll work closely with security, architecture, engineering, delivery and business stakeholders, translating organisational risk and policy into practical DevSecOps solutions.

Key Responsibilities

Define target and transitional DevSecOps/platform architectures
Design secure software supply-chain capabilities covering SCA, vulnerability scanning, secrets detection, SBOMs, software signing and provenance
Develop architecture patterns across CI/CD, artefact repositories, containers and runtime provisioning
Define identity, SSO, RBAC, logging and auditable security controls
Establish policy-as-code and automated security enforcement
Assess and advise on vendor solutions and deployment options
Define approved, controlled and unsupported technology usage patterns
Design governance, exception handling and risk-acceptance mechanisms
Create reusable reference architectures and patterns that can scale across multiple domains
Facilitate architecture workshops and technical decision-making
Ensure solutions align with enterprise architecture and security obligations
Balance security controls with developer experience and engineering productivity

We're looking for someone with strong experience across DevSecOps, Platform Engineering and Security/Enterprise Architecture, ideally within large or highly regulated organisations.

You'll need:

Strong enterprise DevSecOps and platform architecture experience
Excellent understanding of secure software supply chains
Strong knowledge of CI/CD, containers and Kubernetes
Experience with SCA, vulnerability management, secrets management and SBOMs
Knowledge of policy-as-code and automated security controls
Experience with identity, SSO, RBAC and security governance
Strong architecture documentation and reference-pattern experience
Experience translating security policy and risk into practical engineering solutions
Excellent stakeholder management and workshop facilitation skills
The ability to influence across Security, Architecture, Engineering and Delivery
Knowledge of DSPT, CAF or similar security/assurance frameworks would be highly beneficial
Active SC Clearance is essential

The role is predominantly remote, with occasional site visits required in London and/or Manchester.

This is an opportunity to play a key role in shaping an enterprise DevSecOps capability, with a strong combination of architecture, security, governance and platform engineering.

If you're an SC-cleared DevSecOps, Platform, Cloud Security or Enterprise Architect looking for your next contract, we'd be keen to hear from you.