Lead Specialist Engineer - Networks

Job summary

The role holder is responsible for delivering a consistent level of availability and performance for their specialist systems and, where necessary, to work with other specialist engineers and ICT team members to deliver this. They will respond to incidents and outages and take necessary steps to secure the service and minimize disruption to the UKHSA business areas.

They will act as a point of expertise for their specialist area and will provide advice, guidance and training as required, especially where this improves or enhances the service provided to end users.

This role offers a non-consolidated, non-pensionable Market Pay Supplement (MPS) of up to £10,000 per annum, dependent on capability assessment. The MPS is payable until December 2026 or until the Government Digital and Data (GDD) Framework is implemented within UKHSA, whichever is sooner.

Working for your organisation

We pride ourselves as being an employer of choice, where Everyone Matters promoting equality of opportunity to actively encourage applications from everyone, including groups currently underrepresented in our workforce.

UKHSA ethos is to be an inclusive organisation for all our staff and stakeholders. To create, nurture and sustain an inclusive culture, where differences drive innovative solutions to meet the needs of our workforce and wider communities. We do this through celebrating and protecting differences by removing barriers and promoting equity and equality of opportunity for all.

Please visit our careers site for more information https://gov.uk/ukhsa/careers

Job description

• Assisting the Senior Specialist Engineer to ensure that any hardware, software, operating systems or associated technology is designed, procured and delivered in the most efficient and cost-effective manner and that all resources are used in such a way that maximizes the benefit to UKHSA.
• Work in a collaborative manner with other colleagues to deliver tasks successfully.
• Plan, configure, manage and maintain all hardware and software components of specialist area to deliver optimum system availability to users, and ensuring all supplier provided patches and upgrades to the operating system, database, tools and utilities are applied in a timely manner.
• Maintain the security and integrity of all systems related to specialist area including managing all user access rights and implementation of backup regimes and other disaster recovery procedures.
• Providing technical and administrative support for specialist systems, including the production of system specification documentation and the production of relevant procedures and protocols.
• Monitoring and managing system performance and capacity growth, providing advice on necessary upgrades and replacement of hardware and software so as to maintain the reliability of the systems. Implement hardware changes and upgrades and database upgrades and migrations to maintain system performance and growth capacity.
• Ensuring compliance with UKHSA ICT and other relevant policies.
• To maintain awareness of technical developments and research new technologies with a view to providing advice to the Senior Specialist Engineer on suitable deployment strategies for UKHSA.
• To conduct such work as directed by the Senior Engineer or Team Manager consistently with departmental standards and to agreed timescales
• Responsible for maintaining own specialist skills with appropriate professional training.
• To provide the Senior Specialist Engineer or Team Manager with estimates of effort and timescales for tasks as required.
• Carry out support and service to all customers during the agreed working hours, including any out of hours working
• To comply with departmental and UKHSA requirements for the reporting of all absences.
• Provide a level of work that adheres to the high standards and best practices in line with the SLAs as agreed with UKHSA Users.

Main duties of the job

Lead Specialist Engineers are responsible for supporting the delivery of technical excellence in their field of network specialisms and assisting the Senior Specialist Engineer in ensuring that all systems are optimally configured to provide a high-quality service to UKHSA users.

They may be required to supervise the activity of junior staff, but will mainly be responsible for undertaking the configuration, management and maintenance of all hardware and software components of UKHSA’s network infrastructure.

Please note, the above is not exhaustive.

Person specification

Essential Criteria

• This is a role that demands detailed knowledge and considerable experience of specialist technologies. Therefore, each candidate must be able to demonstrate expertise in multiple integral technologies as indicated on the list below:

1. Extreme Networks and Cisco network equipment
2. Network routing and TCP/IP protocols
3. Palo Alto Firewalls
4. Extreme Networks (or equivalent) Wireless access point technologies
5. VPN deployment and configuration
6. NCSC requirements for the implementation, management and administration of secure networks.
7. Familiarity with NCSC Secure by Design Principles.
8. Understanding of network security principles and practices, data encryption and remote access technologies
9. WAN/LAN/WLAN Architectures
10. Application Delivery Controllers and/or Load Balancing technologies

• Must have previous experience of undertaking a specialist role and of managing systems for a large user base.
• Experience with monitoring a network infrastructure to optimize performance and support capacity planning
• Ability to analyse and interpret information, pre-empt and evaluate issues, and recommend and appropriate course of action to address the issues
• Ability to work on own initiative and organise own workload without supervision working to tight and often changing timescales
• Formal technical qualification, eg Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) or equivalent

Desirable Criteria

• Experience with Network Function Virtualisation and Software Defined Network architecture
• Skills for communication on complex matters and difficult situations, requiring persuasion and influence

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £41,983, UK Health Security Agency contributes £12,162 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).

• Learning and development tailored to your role
• An environment with flexible working options
• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity
• A Civil Service pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

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