Lead Platform Engineer

Job summary

DVSA is seeking a Lead Platform Engineer to help shape and deliver the technical strategy for large-scale digital services, ensuring they remain secure, resilient, scalable and cost-effective.

Working closely with the Principal Cloud Engineer, you will lead a code-first approach to infrastructure, driving cloud engineering standards, automation and platform delivery across multiple teams. You will provide technical leadership, build engineering capability and help teams deliver high-quality services through consistent practices and a streamlined path to live.

Our primary platform is AWS, with experience of Azure, GitHub Actions and SaaS integrations desirable.

Key Requirements

Can you?...

• Champion CI/CD, DevOps principles and Infrastructure as Code?
• Lead and support multiple teams to deliver against engineering standards?
• Mentor engineers and testers to improve capability and delivery?

Are you?...

• Someone with strong hands-on experience of AWS, Linux, Docker, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Puppet and AWS Landing Zone?
• Someone with excellent leadership, coaching and stakeholder management skills?
• Someone with experience of cloud and SaaS integration within complex environments?

Have you?...

• Delivered standardised, automated cloud platforms at scale?
• Designed secure, resilient and cost-effective cloud infrastructure?
• Shaped technical strategy with senior stakeholders?

If so, we'd love to hear from you.

About DVSA and the Team

The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) is a public sector body responsible for maintaining road safety and improving standards for drivers, vehicles, and driving instructors across Great Britain. Our Digital Delivery function is at the forefront of this mission, transforming legacy systems into modern, agile, and user-centric digital services that are used by millions. You will join our collaborative Digital Services division, working specifically within the Digital team. This team delivers mission-critical services, operating at scale in the cloud to ensure citizens can easily access essential government services, from booking driving tests to managing vehicle compliance.

Joining our department comes with many benefits, including:

• Employer pension contribution of 28.97% of your salary. Read more about Civil Service Pensions here
• 25 days annual leave, increasing by 1 day each year of service (up to a maximum of 30 days annual leave), plus 8 bank holidays a privilege day for the King’s birthday.
• Flexible working options where we encourage a great work-life balance.

Read more in the Benefits section below!

Find out more about what it's like working at Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency - Department for Transport Careers

Job description

As the Lead Platform Engineer, you'll be instrumental in architecting, securing, digital build and automating DVSA's large-scale cloud services, primarily on AWS. You'll lead and mentor multiple teams, enforce code-first IaC standards, and manage the path-to-live for critical digital services. You'll champion technical excellence, influence strategy, and collaborate across government to ensure highly available, value-driven service delivery.

Your responsibilities will include, but aren’t limited to:

1. Hands-On Technical Leadership & Strategic Alignment: Provide hands-on technical direction and influence to multiple DevOps teams, ensuring their work is consistently aligned with the Principal Cloud Engineer's technical strategy and Civil Service values.
2. Standardisation & Governance: Lead the establishment, definition, and enforcement of DevOps standards and procedures across the lifecycle (IaC, CI/CD), rigorously reviewing and hands-on assuring the designs of others to embed security controls and high standards.
3. Team Guidance and Capability Uplift: Act as a Subject Matter Expert to proactively guide, mentor, and upskill team members and colleagues of varying maturity levels, fostering a continuous learning environment and providing practical, technical support.
4. Hands-On Cloud Architecture & Security Design: Personally design and architect highly available, cost-effective, and secure services on major cloud platforms (specifically AWS, with Azure awareness), ensuring solutions meet performance targets and business needs.
5. Infrastructure Automation (IaC) Implementation: Drive the code-first implementation and hands-on automation of infrastructure using configuration management tools like Terraform, Puppet, and Ansible, prioritising and executing automation opportunities to improve delivery efficiency.
6. End-to-End Delivery and Environment Ownership: Take hands-on technical ownership of the service journey from concept to live deployment, including the management, maintenance, and patching of pre-production environments to ensure a smooth, secure, and effective path-to-live.
7. Live Service Resolution & Support: Act as a recognised Subject Matter Expert to provide technical guidance and work hands-on with Service Management functions, leading the resolution of complex live technical issues and managing maintenance programs.
8. Process Optimisation & Stakeholder Engagement: Actively participate in Agile ceremonies and delivery processes, collaborating with senior stakeholders, Product Owners, and cross-functional CSLs to align technical solutions with business goals and drive continuous process optimisation.

Great line management is important to us as an organisation, and we will equip and support line managers to develop the skills they need. We aim to empower line managers to create teams where people can flourish and deliver excellent outcomes for the public.

For further information on the role, please read the attached role profile. Please note that the role profile is for information purposes only - whilst all elements are relevant to the role, they may not all be assessed during the recruitment process. This job advert will detail exactly what will be assessed during the recruitment process.

Person specification

Required experience:

To be successful in this role you will need to have the following experience:

1. Experience managing individuals as well as guiding cross discipline teams using Agile delivery frameworks (ideally scrum).
2. Experience delivery and contributing to a cloud strategy with mixed maturity teams.
3. Experience delivering large scale cloud deliverables in a highly regulated environment.

Government Digital and Data Allowance

The role is part of the Government Digital and Data (or Government Security Profession Career Framework) profession and utilises an enhanced Capability–Based Pay Framework which provides access to a Digital and Data allowance.

The base pay is £57,515. In addition to this the role includes a Digital and Data allowance of up to £24,915.

The value of allowance awarded will be based on an assessment of your skills and experience as demonstrated through the selection process. Here are more details on the pay framework.

Please note that we do not hold a UK Visa & Immigration (UKVI) Skilled Worke