DevOps Architect

Federal Police – Judicial General Directorate

Contract until March but renewable

Work Environment

The Federal Judicial Police is a specialized police force, mainly responsible for combating organized crime in all its forms. It is one of the three general directorates of the federal police and handles investigation files related to areas such as cybercrime, terrorism, major crime, drug trafficking, and many others. It provides support and expertise to the entire integrated police force, as well as to its national and international partners.

Within this directorate are the operational resources assigned to judicial police operations, the fight against serious and organized crime, special units, as well as technical and scientific police operations.

To meet its specialized needs, the DGJ has set up an IT Line comprising a central level, in addition to various decentralized teams within the directorates making up the judicial pillar. The IT line includes a Data division, specialized in data engineering and data science, a Software division that develops various applications and services, and finally an Operations division responsible for setting up and maintaining the infrastructure on which the Data and Software divisions rely.

You will be assigned as a DevOps Architect within the Operations division of the IT line of the DGJ. Your main role will be to ensure the implementation and support of various DevOps tools and processes, enabling the automated industrialization of developed solutions as well as the infrastructures intended to host them. These operational projects are critical and provide support to the entire judicial pillar.

This function includes two main technical areas:

1. Kubernetes: setup, configuration, maintenance, and industrialization of Kubernetes clusters, whose provisioning is done via Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC).

2. CI/CD: setup, configuration, and maintenance of continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) for the various software projects and IaC infrastructures developed within the IT Line.

The Kubernetes clusters implemented may be deployed on physical (Bare-Metal), virtual (VM), or hybrid infrastructures.

Given the significant load and the criticality of the applications and information processed, you will ensure that the deployed infrastructures are:

• High availability: capable of operating without interruption in case of failure or maintenance.

• Secure: protection of data and access in accordance with security standards.

• Scalable: possibility to increase resources both horizontally (adding nodes) and vertically (increasing a node’s resources).

You will also serve as the link between the Data Engineering, Data Science, and Software divisions and the Operations Division. As an architect, you will integrate the various requests from these teams in order to identify appropriate technical solutions and implement them in collaboration with your colleagues from the Operations Division.

Main Tasks

Initially, you will be responsible for setting up a Kubernetes cluster to provide a new development environment for the teams. This cluster will be provisioned using infrastructure as code and deployed on bare-metal servers. It must be set up optimally, as it will then serve as a model for deploying the various production environments. The objective is to ensure the management of new infrastructures using an IaC approach. During this phase, you will already implement an initial CI/CD process for this infrastructure-as-code project.

Subsequently, you will be responsible for setting up continuous integration and continuous delivery for the various projects under development within the IT line. A base already exists, but it needs to be evolved to ensure an optimal process. The projects are varied, ranging from classic web application development to projects oriented towards Artificial Intelligence.

Afterwards, you will be responsible for maintaining these elements and evolving them according to requests or identified issues. In parallel, you will also be responsible for setting up new K8S clusters. You will be supported by other members of the operations division for the physical installation and network aspects.

Profile Sought

You hold at least a bachelor’s degree or ideally a master’s degree in computer science and can demonstrate several years of experience in a similar role.

You have solid knowledge in setting up and administering Kubernetes clusters and are able to do this on-premises. Storage management, integration of a database cluster, ingress, Kubeflow as well as exposing and securing services in a K8S environment hold no secrets for you.

You possess good knowledge of security, applied to a Kubernetes environment. You can ensure the implementation of security certificates as well as the automation of their management, including for private domains.

You have proven experience in CI/CD and in setting up deployment pipelines with GitLab for both development projects and infrastructure-as-code.

You have knowledge of software development, and concepts such as REST API, Message Broker, and OpenID and EntraID authentication are familiar to you.

You are used to working in an agile environment and are capable of taking the lead in a project. You can easily adapt to a change of direction or a new technology not yet mastered. You are perseverant, solution-oriented, and easily integrate into a team with varied profiles and experiences.

You are fluent in English as well as one of the two national languages. Active knowledge of one national language and passive knowledge (at least) of the other is a real asset.

Knowledge of the Police environment, and more particularly of the Federal Judicial Police, is a significant advantage.

Hard Skills

• Kubernetes: Deployment, administration, securing, and supervision of clusters in bare-metal, virtual, or hybrid environments. Optimization of scaling and fault tolerance.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Mastery of Terraform and knowledge of Pulumi (asset). Design and automation of reproducible and traceable infrastructure provisioning.

• Scripting and configuration: Development and automation via Python and YAML (Kubernetes manifests, CI/CD pipelines, Ansible playbooks).

• Monitoring / Logging / Service Mesh: Implementation of tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and Istio for supervision, observability, and application traffic management.

• Security: Management of secrets and certificates, implementation of RBAC policies and Network Policies, integration of secure authentication mechanisms.

• Containers: Mastery of Docker for creating and managing images and containers, integration into Kubernetes and CI/CD workflows.

• CI/CD: Proven experience with GitLab (pipelines, runners, integrations). Automation of the complete build, test, and deployment cycle.

• Authentication and entity management: Integration of OpenID Connect and the Microsoft 365 (O365) ecosystem for federated access and unified authentication.

• API and interservice communication: Design and integration of service-oriented architectures via REST API, gRPC, SignalR, RabbitMQ, and MassTransit.

• Project management: Application of Agile / Scrum methodologies, active participation in sprints, continuous integration, and close collaboration with development and operations teams.

Soft Skills

• Ability to unite: Able to align heterogeneous profiles around a common objective.

• Perseverance: Stay the course and do not give up, even in the face of major difficulties.

• Ability to smooth things over: Calm tensions, maintain a constructive atmosphere under pressure, and play a regulatory role between stakeholders and the team.

• Initiative: Proactive in anticipating challenges and initiating project dynamics without waiting for systematic validation.

• Sense of priorities: Identify critical tasks to achieve objectives, maintain a long-term vision to anticipate next steps, and reorganize work based on unforeseen events or new elements that arise during the project.

• User/client orientation: Manage priorities taking into account real field needs and user experience.

• Clear and spontaneous communication: Communicate fluently, deliver the right message, at the right time, and at the right level. Be able to explain technical concepts to non-technicians.

• Cross-functional vision: Integrate technical, human, organizational, and political dimensions in decision-making.

• Analytical mindset: Go beyond symptoms to identify the root causes of problems.