Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Job summary

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is the digital centre of government. We are responsible for setting, leading and delivering the vision for a modern digital government.

Our priorities are to drive a modern digital government, by:

1. joining up public sector services
2. harnessing the power of AI for the public good
3. strengthening and extending our digital and data public infrastructure
4. elevating leadership and investing in talent
5. funding for outcomes and procuring for growth and innovation
6. committing to transparency and driving accountability

We are home to the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (I.AI), the world-leading GOV.UK and at the forefront of coordinating the UK’s geospatial strategy and activity. We lead the Government Digital and Data function and champion the work of digital teams across government.

We’re part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and employ more than 1,000 people all over the UK, with hubs in Manchester, London and Bristol.

The Government Digital Service is where talent translates into impact. From your first day, you’ll be working with some of the world’s most highly-skilled digital professionals, all contributing their knowledge to make change on a national scale.

Join us for rewarding work that makes a difference across the UK. You'll solve some of the nation’s highest-priority digital challenges, helping millions of people access services they need

Job description

The National Data Library is the public sector open data hub where users can search and browse for open data from across the public sector. We have an ambitious agenda to transform the way the public sector makes its data available and reusable. Transforming the National Data Library plays a major role in this agenda as we redesign it into a modern reliable data hub which can provide access to a variety of public sector data.

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you’ll play a key role in shaping and improving the performance of the National Data Library platform. Read about a day in the life of a GDS Site Reliability Engineer on the GDS blog, and watch our video about Becoming a site reliability engineer at GDS.

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer you will:

• be part of a multidisciplinary team supporting and maintaining live services for the National Data Library
• provide technical leadership within the team, working with other team members to identify the best approaches and solutions to new cloud-native infrastructure and redesigns
• write infrastructure as code using terraform or CloudFormation to ensure our infrastructure is consistent, reusable and reliable
• deploy and configure observability tools to enable our teams to identify and respond to operational issues quickly and effectively
• build CI/CD pipelines to enable the team to get code into production quickly and reliably
• provide day-to-day support for our platform and tools to ensure they remain available, secure and robust
• share your knowledge and expertise with your peers and the wider team to drive consistency and develop a culture of openness and learning

Person specification

We’re interested in people who can demonstrate:

• systems design – design and manage cloud-native infrastructure (e.g., AWS), using infrastructure as code to deliver consistent, secure, and scalable environments aligned to National Data Library needs
• user focus – collaborate effectives with stakeholders to understand user and service needs, ensuring DevOps solutions enable accessible, performant, and reliable digital services
• availability and capacity management – manage and optimise service performance, ensuring scalable, highly available, and resilient cloud-native platforms that meet user and business demand
• delivery process optimisation – improve and automate delivery pipelines (CI/CD), enabling frequent, reliable, and low-risk releases across the full software lifecycle
• information security – embed security best practices and ensure compliance with government standards (including GDPR), integrating security into development and deployment pipelines
• modern development standards – apply and promote modern engineering standards, including version control, automated testing, continuous integration, and reusable, maintainable code
• programming and build – use scripting and programming (e.g., Python) to automate infrastructure, tooling, and deployment processes, improving developer productivity
• service support – support and maintain live production services, implementing monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes to ensure reliability and rapid recovery
• systems integration – integrate cloud infrastructure, APIs, and data pipelines to enable seamless, secure, and scalable interoperability across platforms supporting the National Data Library

Benefits

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
• 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).

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

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 ma