DevOps Engineer Apprenticeship

Met Office

UK (EX1 3PB)

Closes in 14 days (Friday 28 March)

Posted on 13 March 2025


Summary

We’re looking for two exceptional DevOps Engineer Level 4 Apprentices to help us make a difference to our planet.

Wage
£22,911 a year

Minimum wage rates (opens in new tab)

As our DevOps Engineer Apprentice, your starting salary will be £22,911 and you will have the opportunity to progress to £24,259 over time.

Training course
DevOps engineer (level 4)
Hours
All details will be confirmed upon interview.

37 hours a week

Possible start date

Tuesday 2 September

Duration

1 year 8 months

Positions available

2

Work

Most of your apprenticeship is spent working. You’ll learn on the job by getting hands-on experience.

What you’ll do at work

As an Apprentice DevOps Engineer in the APIM Team, your key responsibilities are:

  • Work as part of the team, to ensure that service level agreements are being met
  • Monitor the service and develop innovative solutions to identified issues
  • Support internal teams with onboarding onto the APIM service

The Logging, Monitoring and Alerting (LMA) team are responsible for providing a standard approach to all monitoring and alerting in the Met Office. These supported tools are critical for enabling all of the Met Office’s production services and are utilised across a number of different infrastructures i.e. AWS Cloud, Azure Cloud, Linux, etc. As a core service provider, you will have exposure to a number of different technical teams within the Met Office.  The key skills that we are looking for from an Apprentice DevOps Engineer with the LMA Team are:

  • The ability to work as part of a team and when required, to work autonomously
  • Enjoy problem solving - can develop innovative solutions to identified issues
  • Support internal teams onboarding onto the LMA service
  • Programming/scripting knowledge or experience preferably using Python

Where you’ll work

Fitzroy Road
Exeter
Devon
UK
EX1 3PB

Training

Apprenticeships include time away from working for specialist training. You’ll study to gain professional knowledge and skills.

College or training organisation

QA LIMITED

Your training course

DevOps engineer (level 4)

Equal to higher national certificate (HNC)

Course contents
  • Communicate credibly with technical and non-technical people at all levels, using a range of methods; e.g. ‘Show and Tell’ and ‘Demonstrations’.
  • Work within different organisational cultures with both internal and external parties
  • Translate user needs into deliverable tasks, writing clear, concise and unambiguous user stories that the whole team can understand.
  • Initiate and facilitate knowledge sharing and technical collaboration
  • Deploy immutable infrastructure
  • Install, manage and troubleshoot monitoring tools
  • Navigate and troubleshoot stateful distributed systems, in order to locate issues across the end-to-end service.
  • Work in agile, multi-disciplinary delivery teams, taking a flexible, collaborative and pragmatic approach to delivering tasks.
  • Application of a range of cloud security tools and techniques - e.g. threat modelling, vulnerability scanning, dependency checking, reducing attack surface area - incorporating these tools and techniques into the automated pipeline wherever possible.
  • Assess identified and potential security threats and take appropriate action based on likelihood v impact.
  • Employ a systematic approach to solving problems, using logic and hypotheses / experimentation to identify the source of issues.
  • Automate tasks where it introduces improvements to the efficiency of business processes and reduces waste, considering the effort and cost of automation.
  • Engage in productive pair/mob programming.
  • Write tests and follow Test Driven Development discipline in various different contexts.
  • Release automation and orchestration as part of a Continuous Integration workflow and Continuous Delivery pipeline, automating the delivery of code from source control to the end users.
  • Invest in continuous learning, both your own development and others, ensuring learning activities dovetail with changing job requirements. Keep up with cutting edge.
  • Code in a general purpose programming language.
  • Specify cloud infrastructure in an infrastructure-as-code domain-specific language.
  • Interpret logs and metrics data within the appropriate context to identify issues and make informed decisions.
  • Writing code in such a way that makes merging easier and facilitates branching by abstraction - i.e. feature toggling.
  • Application of lightweight modelling techniques, such as whiteboarding, in order to gain consensus as a team on evolving architecture.
  • Incremental refactoring by applying small behaviour-preserving code changes to evolve the architecture.
  • Communicate credibly with technical and non-technical people at all levels, using a range of methods; e.g. ‘Show and Tell’ and ‘Demonstrations’.
  • Work within different organisational cultures with both internal and external parties
  • Translate user needs into deliverable tasks, writing clear, concise and unambiguous user stories that the whole team can understand.
  • Initiate and facilitate knowledge sharing and technical collaboration
  • Deploy immutable infrastructure
  • Install, manage and troubleshoot monitoring tools
  • Navigate and troubleshoot stateful distributed systems, in order to locate issues across the end-to-end service.
  • Work in agile, multi-disciplinary delivery teams, taking a flexible, collaborative and pragmatic approach to delivering tasks.
  • Application of a range of cloud security tools and techniques - e.g. threat modelling, vulnerability scanning, dependency checking, reducing attack surface area - incorporating these tools and techniques into the automated pipeline wherever possible.
  • Assess identified and potential security threats and take appropriate action based on likelihood v impact.
  • Employ a systematic approach to solving problems, using logic and hypotheses / experimentation to identify the source of issues.
  • Automate tasks where it introduces improvements to the efficiency of business processes and reduces waste, considering the effort and cost of automation.
  • Engage in productive pair/mob programming.
  • Write tests and follow Test Driven Development discipline in various different contexts.
  • Release automation and orchestration as part of a Continuous Integration workflow and Continuous Delivery pipeline, automating the delivery of code from source control to the end users.
  • Invest in continuous learning, both your own development and others, ensuring learning activities dovetail with changing job requirements. Keep up with cutting edge.
  • Code in a general purpose programming language.
  • Specify cloud infrastructure in an infrastructure-as-code domain-specific language.
  • Interpret logs and metrics data within the appropriate context to identify issues and make informed decisions.
  • Writing code in such a way that makes merging easier and facilitates branching by abstraction - i.e. feature toggling.
  • Application of lightweight modelling techniques, such as whiteboarding, in order to gain consensus as a team on evolving architecture.
  • Incremental refactoring by applying small behaviour-preserving code changes to evolve the architecture.

Your training plan

We would look for you to join us in September 2025 with your apprenticeship training beginning shortly afterwards. You would have 1 day per week dedicated to your 20% off the job training. The training will mostly be delivered online as well as self study with the training provider, QA.

Before applying, we recommend you consider if the delivery method suits your learner needs along with whether you feel you are committed to your own development and training, as this element forms a significant aspect of a modern apprenticeship. 

The job may be suitable for hybrid working.

All details will be confirmed upon interview.

More training information

You will be managed by a line manager and have a mentor to offer further support. In addition to the formal training with a registered provider, you will also have in house and on the job training.

You will have the opportunity to work with a team covering the support of development and operation of software tools, environment and practices in the Met Office. This will allow you to develop your knowledge, skill and behaviours in this occupation whilst contributing to Met Office aims. 

Requirements

Essential qualifications

A Level in:

  • any related subject (grade Level 3)

Let the company know about other relevant qualifications and industry experience you have. They can adjust the apprenticeship to reflect what you already know.

Skills

  • Communication skills
  • IT skills
  • Attention to detail
  • Organisation skills
  • Problem solving skills
  • Number skills
  • Analytical skills
  • Team working
  • Non judgemental

Other requirements

If you are considering applying and need support to do so, please contact us via careers@metoffice.gov.uk . You can request adjustments either within your application or by contacting us. We can only accept applications from those eligible to live and work in the UK - please refer to GOV.UK for information.

About this company

Everything we do is based on world-leading science and enhanced by the close working relationships we have with partners around the globe. We collect and make sense of massive amounts of data every day, using cutting-edge technology to deliver it into the hands of the people that need it, when it matters.

https://careers.metoffice.gov.uk/ (opens in new tab)

Disability Confident

Disability Confident

A fair proportion of interviews for this apprenticeship will be offered to applicants with a disability or long-term health condition. This includes non-visible disabilities and conditions.

You can choose to be considered for an interview under the Disability Confident scheme. You’ll need to meet the essential requirements to be considered for an interview.

After this apprenticeship

There is potential for it to develop into a permanent position on successful completion of your apprenticeship.

Ask a question

The contact for this apprenticeship is:

QA LIMITED

The reference code for this apprenticeship is VAC1000309372.

Apply now

Closes in 14 days (Friday 28 March)

When you apply, you’ll be asked to sign in with a GOV.UK One Login. You can create one at the same time as applying for this apprenticeship.

After signing in, you’ll apply for this apprenticeship on the company's website.