Lead Systems Engineer

The NHS is building a culture that is positive, compassionate and inclusive - and we all have our part to play. As employers we are committed to protecting and promoting the physical and mental health and wellbeing of all our colleagues. This underpins our values as set out in the NHS Constitution and supports us to be an Employer of Choice, while helping our colleagues to deliver high quality services for our patients and communities. As a flexible employer, we want to support you to work in a way that is best for the NHS, our patients and you. Talk to us about how we might be able to accommodate a flexible working arrangement whether that's a job share, part time, hybrid working or another flexible pattern. In addition, although the role advertised may have a 'home' office base indicated, we remain committed to supporting flexibility around workplace locations. If it works for the service, we will do our best to make it work for you. We are an accredited Living Wage Employer which means that every colleague working for our organisation and third-party contractors will earn a real Living Wage. We are one of over 15,000 organisations, who voluntarily chose to pay the real Living Wage., A Lead Systems Engineer is typically the technical lead for multidisciplinary teams delivering and operating multiple components for a system. We work on national, highly available distributed systems being built and run by in house teams. The systems can differ in size, scale and purpose, but an example system would:

• Have a round-the-clock requirement to be available to a level of 99.9% or higher.

• Have a national-scale impact on unavailability, and cope with the load associated with a daily transactional user-base of more than one hundred thousand people.

• Adopt modern Cloud best-practices and open standards to support interoperability and re-usability.

• Achieve high availability through operational simplicity.

• Provide flexible low-cost horizontal scale out to handle expected and unexpected variations in load.

• Handle the architectural trade-offs necessary to avoid logical bottlenecks.

• Provide security controls appropriate for the storage of large volumes of sensitive data - hundreds of millions of records and documents.

• Have a direct clinical impact on patient care. We now have an exciting opportunity to join our Demographics team in Products and Platforms, which builds and operates a set of products including the Personal Demographics Service (PDS) and GP Registration, + Developing, building and operating national, highly available distributed systems being built and run within NHS England.

• Operating within and contributing to the NHS England engineering principles.

• Have technical ownership across the system space, including application, environments, infrastructure and networks, pipelines and operational tools.

• Engaged in peer-to-peer collaboration to solve engineering problems and drive-up organisation engineering standards. This is a significant part of the Lead Systems Engineer role, in the order of 25% of time.

• Responsible for Engineering maturity within the team.

• Coaching and mentoring colleagues to develop the team., The post of Lead Systems Engineer has been awarded a Recruitment and Retention Premia (RRP) in response to current labour market conditions. In recognition of this, the role attracts an additional monthly RRP payment equal to 20% per annum. Please be aware that RRP is non-contractual and subject to review. On-call Participation in a shared on-call rota is required to support a 24/7/365 service, this rota covers evenings, weekends, and public holidays. Our commitments to you We are passionate about creating an inclusive workplace that promotes and values diversity. We know that different ideas, perspectives and backgrounds create a stronger and more creative work environment that delivers better patient outcomes. We strive to ensure our people feel trusted, valued and empowered. We're passionate about nurturing and developing people. When you join us, we want you to grow and excel, and we offer many opportunities for you to do that. We welcome your talent and enthusiasm irrespective of age, disability, neuro-divergence, sex, gender identity and gender expression, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, sexual orientation, or other personal circumstances. We have policies and procedures to ensure that all applicants are treated fairly and consistently at every stage of the recruitment process, including the consideration of reasonable adjustments for people who have a disability and/or who are neuro-divergent. We welcome applications from disabled candidates. If you meet all the essential criteria, you will be guaranteed an interview. Your application is your opportunity to demonstrate to us how you meet the requirements of the role. Whilst we appreciate that you may have had support with your application (e.g., using AI technology or guidance from a trusted individual), it's important that the information contained within your application reflects your own knowledge, skill, and experience and we trust that you apply on that basis. If applying for this role on a secondment basis, please make sure you have obtained prior agreement from your current line manager to apply for this position. Please note that we currently do not accept applications via recruitment agencies. To comply with the HM Government Functional Standard GovS 007, and specifically the Personnel Security Standards 2024, individuals employed or contracted by NHS England may be required to undergo a Baseline Personnel Security Standards check, dependent on the role. The NHS Business Services Authority is responsible for the processing of your application; a privacy notice is attached to advise you on how we will process your personal data. If you have applied via NHS Jobs, your submitted application will be imported into our preferred third-party recruitment system. All subsequent information regarding your application will be generated from apps.trac.jobs. If you are appointed to a post, information will also be transferred into the NHS Electronic Staff Records system.

• Experience working on a complex application across all layers of the stack including application, infrastructure, CI/CD, testing, monitoring and alerting etc.
• Implementing quality-focussed development practices and testing techniques
• Experience of taking a lead role, for example driving design decisions or managing stakeholders effectively.
• Experience of driving and implementing improvements within a product or team.
• Working within a team to deliver software in a collaborative way

Our work supports the NHS to deliver high quality services for patients and best value for taxpayers. Our staff bring expertise across hundreds of specialisms - including clinical, operational, commissioning, technology, data science, cyber security, software engineering, education, and commercial - enabling us to design and deliver high-quality NHS services. We lead the NHS in England by: + Enabling local systems and providers to improve the health of their people and patients and reduce health inequalities + Making the NHS a great place to work, where our people can make a difference and achieve their potential + Working collaboratively to ensure our healthcare workforce has the right knowledge, skills, values and behaviours to deliver accessible, compassionate care + Optimising the use of digital technology, research, and innovation + Delivering value for money Earlier this year, the Government announced that NHS England will gradually merge with the Department of Health and Social Care, leading to full integration. The aim is to create a smaller, more strategic centre that reduces duplication and eliminates waste. If successful at interview, we will initiate an Inter Authority Transfer (IAT) via the Electronic Staff Record (ESR). This retrieves key data from your current or previous NHS employer to support onboarding, including competency status, Continuous Service Dates (CSD), and annual leave entitlement. You may opt out at any stage of the recruitment process., Earlier this year the Government announced that NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care will increasingly merge functions, ultimately leading to NHS England being fully integrated into the Department. The purpose of this change is to create a smaller, more strategic centre which will reduce duplication and eliminate waste., NHS England