Lead Site Reliability Engineer
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
The GOV.UK One Login for Government Programme represents a once in a generation opportunity to simplify and widen access to all digital government services. Sitting at the heart of the government, we are building one simple, safe and secure way for users to Log in and prove who they are that will work across all government services.
GOV.UK One Login is being designed and built for the many, not the few. It will unite services across government, revolutionising the way government departments digitally interact with users. One Login will deliver an accessible and essential function that will change lives and help millions. We are an ambitious and visionary team so if you want to be at heart of this truly ground-breaking programme keep reading
The GOV.UK One Login programme is full of talented and passionate people who are consistently delivering high quality products for services and individuals. We're half way through our build phase and features are being shipped almost weekly as we work to mature our product set so that we can expand the range of services and departments benefitting from our work.
As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer, you'll share the responsibility for the delivery of our new way for people to prove their identity online.
You'll work closely with the programme Head of SRE, Head of Architecture, Head of Engineering,Head of Test & Quality Engineering, other Lead SREs as well as other senior leaders. You'll work to enable our multi-disciplinary teams to build and run services as quickly and safely as possible. You'll be a leader across the engineering team with a focus on how we build, scale and improve the infrastructure platform and tooling. You will run these as service offerings to service teams across the programme.
As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer you'll:
- identify and promote best practice in reliability engineering
- work in a multidisciplinary manner across the programme by working with SREs, developers, technical architects, product managers and others, to provide robust, resilient and scalable platforms
- ensure the programme has the right processes in place, including identifying and measuring important metrics to drive continual improvement
- work with colleagues on identification of technical risks in relation to the infrastructure, as well as plans to resolve or mitigate the risks
- communicate concerns, risks and issues with the broader team and senior management
- prioritise and deliver recommendations and improvements in response to incident reviews
- set an example for and encourage open, positive, and constructive communication both within the team and when communicating with other GDS teams
- cultivate and maintain relationships with other teams within GDS, Cabinet Office, and the rest of government
- mentor and manage site reliability engineers and developers
- work with teams, Cyber Security and Information Assurance to ensure ongoing integrity and security of our service and infrastructure
- participate in an out-of-hours rota, * a simple application screening process - We only ask for a CV and cover letter of up to 750 words. Important tip - please ensure that your cover letter includes how you meet the skills and experience listed in the "person specification" section above
- a 90 minute video interview. As part of the interview process there will be a technical test.
Depending on how many applications we get, there might also be an extra stage before the video interview, for example a phone interview or a technical exercise.
Artificial Intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.
In the event we receive a high volume of applications, we will conduct the initial sift against the lead criteria which is:
- operating effectively at a senior level across a large programme of work with experience of collaborating with and managing stakeholders and senior management
In the Civil Service, we use Success Profiles to evaluate your skills and ability. This gives us the best possible chance of finding the right person for the job, increases performance and improves diversity and inclusivity. We'll be assessing your technical abilities, skills, experience and behaviours that are relevant to this role., A reserve list will be held for a period of 12 months, from which further appointments can be made.
The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan and the Civil Service D&I Strategy.
Please note that this role requires SC clearance, which would normally need 5 years' UK residency in the past 5 years. This is not an absolute requirement, but supplementary checks may be needed where individuals have not lived in the UK for that period. This may mean your security clearance (and therefore your appointment) will take longer or, in some cases, not be possible.
For meaningful checks to be carried out, you will need to have lived in the UK for a sufficient period of time, to enable appropriate checks to be carried out and produce a result which provides the required level of assurance. Whilst a lack of UK residency in itself is not necessarily a bar to a security clearance, and expectation of UK residency may range from 3 to 5 years. Failure to meet the residency requirements needed for the role may result in the withdrawal of provisional jobs offers.
Sponsorship
DSIT cannot offer Visa sponsorship to candidates through this campaign. DSIT holds a Visa sponsorship licence but this can only be used for certain roles and this campaign does not qualify. Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.
Security
Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check. Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is security check .
See our vetting charter . People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks., * UK nationals
- nationals of the Republic of Ireland
- nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
- nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
- nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
- individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
- Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service
Requirements
Do you have experience in Terraform?, * operating effectively at a senior level across a large programme of work with experience of collaborating with and managing stakeholders and senior management
- working with large scale fully cloud based serverless or container-based architectures
- technical leadership of people across multiple teams, feeding into strategy and long-term roadmaps, as well as delegating design decisions as necessary
- working at a mixture of various product stages - greenfield, maturing greenfield into operational services, in addition to established live services
- bringing an operational mindset to all stages of development
- troubleshooting a complex, multi-application service in a high availability environment
- enabling large scale delivery through managing fully automated and staged CI & CD pipelines that deliver to production
- an infrastructure-as-code approach and experience of Terraform or AWS SAM or similar
- managing the lifecycle of cloud based data stores
- leading on observability - logging, monitoring and alerting and defining service level indicators and objectives
- detailed knowledge of application, infrastructure and network security practices with experience of embedding these into service teams
- managing teams or projects, helping colleagues with their career development and coaching more junior staff members, * working together
- changing and improving
- making effective decisions
- leadership
- developing self and others
We'll also be assessing your experience and specialist technical skills against the following skills defined in the Government Digital and Data Capability Framework for the Lead DevOps Engineer role:
- availability and capacity management
- development process optimisation
- information security
- modern standards approach
- programming and build (software engineering)
- service support
- systems design
- systems integration
Benefits & conditions
Pulled from the full job description
- Childcare
- Annual leave
- Employee discount
- Company pension
- Paid volunteer time
- Cycle to work scheme, £69,523 - £103,924, There are many benefits of working at GDS, including:
- flexible hybrid working with flexi-time and the option to work part-time or condensed hours
- a Civil Service Pension with an average employer contribution of 28.97%
- 25 days of annual leave, increasing by a day each year up to a maximum of 30 days
- an extra day off for the King's birthday
- an in-year bonus scheme to recognise high performance
- career progression and coaching, including a training budget for personal development
- paid volunteering leave
- a focus on wellbeing with access to an employee assistance programme
- job satisfaction from making government services easier to use and more inclusive for people across the UK
- advances on pay, including for travel season tickets
- death in service benefits
- cycle to work scheme and facilities
- access to an employee discounts scheme
- 10 learning days per year
- volunteering opportunities (5 special leave days per year)
- access to a suite of learning activities through Civil Service learning
Any move to Government Digital Service from another employer will mean you can no longer access childcare vouchers. This includes moves between government departments. You may however be eligible for other government schemes, including Tax Free Childcare. Determine your eligibility at https://www.childcarechoices.gov.uk
Office attendance The Department operates a discretionary hybrid working policy, which provides for a combination of working hours from your place of work and from your home in the UK. The current expectation for staff is to attend the office or non-home based location for 40-60% of the time over the accounting period. DSIT does not normally offer full home working (i.e. working at home); but we do offer a variety of flexible working options (including occasionally working from home).
