Senior DevOps Engineer

Job summary

Here at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), we work on things that make a real difference to people’s lives. Whether it's through the homes we live in, the work of our local councils, or the communities we’re all a part of, our work is at the top of the political agenda.

We have ambitious and far-reaching outcomes to achieve this year and, if you’re thinking of joining us, there’s never been a more exciting time. We have circa 3,500 staff who are based in 20 offices across the UK.

The Digital Planning Programme is transforming England’s planning system through modern, user-centred digital services, shared technology capabilities and better use of data.

As a Senior DevOps Engineer, you will provide hands-on engineering and technical leadership across the Digital Planning Programme. You will help delivery teams build, operate and improve secure, reliable and sustainable services, while creating reusable platform capabilities and engineering approaches that benefit the programme as a whole.

You can explore our platform here Planning Data, and as we work in the open, you can find out what we do here at Digital Land.

Job description

Find out more about our Digital teams and what they are working on through our MHCLG Digital blog. Please note that MHCLG do not offer visa sponsorship and applicants will need a valid visa for the duration of your employment.

As a Senior Development Engineer You'll:

• Design, build, operate and improve shared cloud infrastructure and platform capabilities, primarily on AWS.
• Build and maintain automated, repeatable and auditable CI/CD workflows and infrastructure as code.
• Create, document and support the adoption of reusable modules, templates and delivery patterns across programme teams.
• Embed security, observability, resilience, backup, recovery and incident response into live services.
• Work alongside multidisciplinary delivery teams to resolve complex delivery and operational problems, improve reliability and maintainability, and reduce avoidable infrastructure and support costs.
• Provide technical leadership and coaching across teams and suppliers, and support proportionate technical assurance by identifying risks, testing proposed approaches and helping teams meet programme standards.
• Improve developer experience through self-service tooling, clear documentation and secure-by-default ways of working.

Person specification

You will combine substantial hands-on engineering experience with technical leadership. You will make sound decisions under uncertainty, explain risks and trade-offs clearly, collaborate effectively with multidisciplinary teams and suppliers, and improve engineering practice through coaching, reusable approaches and constructive challenge.

Required Experience

• Designing, building and operating secure, reliable AWS-based infrastructure and production services, including making and owning decisions throughout their lifecycle.

• Using Terraform to design, manage and improve infrastructure as code, including reusable modules, testing, change control and state management.

• Designing and maintaining CI/CD workflows.

• Applying secure software-delivery and cloud-security practices, including identity and access management, secrets handling, vulnerability management and automated security checks.

• Observability, incident response, recovery, performance and capacity planning.

• Diagnosing complex delivery or operational problems across application, infrastructure and organisational boundaries.

• Providing technical leadership across multiple teams, coaching engineers, setting or improving engineering approaches, and influencing delivery decisions without relying on direct line-management authority.

• Communicating technical decisions, risks and trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Desirable Experience

• Containerised, Kubernetes or serverless workloads.
• Creating reusable platform capabilities or self-service tooling.
• Government standards and guidance, including the Service Standard, Technology Code of Practice or NCSC guidance.
• Open source, open standards and working in the open.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £64,811, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government contributes £18,775 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).At MHCLG we offer many benefits that range from tailored career pathways and flexible working to MyLifestyle Childcare Voucher and Cycle to Work Schemes. For more information, please click here.

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 may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

Application and Selection
The application process will be split into 2 stages, testing the following Success Profiles:

Behaviours , Experience, Technical

Please ensure your CV does not contain any personally identifiable information.

Note: We do not consider direct CV applications. All applications must be submitted via the provided application link.

Stage 1: Sift (CV)

Experience

CV and supporting evidence assessed against the required experience, with the lead criterion focused on designing, building and operating secure, reliable AWS-based infrastructure and production services.

Most of our campaigns utilise multiple assessors and so it is possible that each of your answers would be viewed by different assessors.

Stage 2: Interview

• Behaviours: Making Effective Decisions, Communicating and Influencing, Changing and Improving
• Experience: Experience questions will be based around the essential skills and criteria as listed in the job description. <