Principal WebOps/DevOps Engineer

Companies House

Apply before 11:55 pm on Monday 26th August 2024

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Details

Reference number

364394

Salary

£49,384 - £63,574

The basic salary is £49,384 - £53,574 with an additional, non-pensionable digital allowance of up to £10,000. The final salary and allowance awarded will be based on an assessment of your skills and experience as demonstrated at interview.

A Civil Service Pension with an average employer contribution of 27%

Job grade

Senior Executive Officer

Band E(IT)

Contract type

Permanent

Business area

CH - Digital Services

Type of role

Digital

Working pattern

Flexible working, Full-time

Number of jobs available

1

Contents

• Location
• About the job
• Benefits
• Things you need to know
• Apply and further information

Location

Cardiff, Wales, CF14 3UZ

About the job

Job summary

We are looking for an enthusiastic Principal WebOps/DevOps Engineer working directly to the Head of Web and Development Operations (DevOps) with great leadership and technical skills and a drive to improve the team. You will be responsible for the leadership of the technical teams at Companies House Web and Development Operations, which are a 24x7 team. You will be user and service focused ensuring that value is delivered through improvement and automation of delivery pipelines, service and application support.   

Companies House leads the way in providing an open and transparent company register.  Our register is searched billions of times a year and valued at over £3 billion to the UK economy, supporting millions of business decisions every day.  

CH offers a flexible and welcoming culture that promotes a healthy work life balance as well as a proactive approach to wellbeing that allows us to be our best at work.  We recognise that people are the key to our success so offer a fantastic benefits package including flexible working with no core hours, 30 days annual leave, 8 bank holidays and 1 privilege day as well as enrolment into the Civil Service Pension scheme with a contribution rate averaging 28%.   

Our team are working in a flexible hybrid approach, combining both home and office-based working. Remote contracts will only be offered to successful candidates who are not a commutable distance to our Cardiff, Belfast or Edinburgh offices. If you are located at a reasonable distance to one our offices, you will receive a hybrid contract aligned to one of our offices. 

Find out more about what a great place Companies House is to work

Job description

You will lead an application support team of DevOps/WebOps teams responsible for maintaining and supporting the organisations internal and public facing systems with supporting and developing their capability from transition from WebOps to a DevOps team mindset, helping to shape the right talent and identifying skills gaps within the teams. 

** You will also be expected to participate in the on-call rota as duty manager in line with the current on-call agreement to ensure our services remain operational at all times.  This on-call element covers 24/7/365 and is an essential requirement of the role.  

Key Deliverables:

• A strong leader with the ability to motivate and sometimes in difficult times, ensuring a focus on career development and innovation while supporting the wellbeing of colleagues. Including mentoring and leading less experienced members of the team
• Transparent, flexible and proactive in your approach to build productive working relationships with your manager, team and other departments are key for the teams and your success.
• Managing and delivering business priorities within a complex landscape of process and technology change. 
• Proven technical background ability to lead a highly skilled hard working team.
• Lead and support any incident/problem to resolution across IT services.
• Will be required to do adhoc reporting and data management as and when needed.
• Making sure availability of web applications to the public target of 99.5% are adhered to.
• Ensure the correct implementation of standards and procedures. You can identify documentation, capacity issues, monitoring, alerting, performance and stipulating the required changes and instigating these. You know how to initiate remedial action across your team and across other areas of Companies House.
• Keeping abreast and understand the direction for future technologies and the changing architectural landscape within Companies House, and ability to articulate that to your manager and team.

Person specification

We're looking for the following experience and technical skills, which will be assessed at sift and at interview.  Please refer to the top 6 points in the experience section, and technical bullet points below when writing your personal statement.

Experience -  please refer to the top 6 points (in bold) in your personal statement

• Leadership, Mentoring – Technical and Managerial
• Incident/Problem resolution management
• Managing complex 24x7 high availability Web Applications systems
• Preferable development background with experience in scripting, Linux systems, development languages, databases will be an advantage.
• Understanding of DevOps and Continuous Integration, Delivery methods and techniques.
• Experience of Performance tuning, monitoring & alerting
• Mentoring and leading less experienced members of the team. 
• Ensure the correct implementation of standards and procedures. You can identify capacity issues, stipulating the required changes and instigating these. You know how to initiate remedial action.
• You understand the direction for future technologies. 
• You can work on delivery of a model to support and maintain future technologies with your team and the wider IT Services teams.
• Experience of ensuring high availability of systems , for example we would expect you working with your head of professions to agreed service levels (currently 99.5% availability).  
• Be at the forefront in the investigation and resolution of incidents, and any write ups. Help resolve any issues that occur and proactively searching for potential solutions ensuring the right actions are taken to investigate, resolve and anticipate future problems in a timely manner. 
• Rapid delivery of user centric services whilst focussing on performance.  
• Experience of managing technical teams in a high pressure environment, but able to bond with the team and develop their technical journeys. 
• Experience of designing and delivering quality services to users. By helping us to shape our services, you’ll have the opportunity to be at the forefront of digital transformation in government.   
• Understanding of Companies House systems and processes would be advantageous but not essential. 

Technical - please refer to these in your personal statement

Unix & Shell Scripting, XML, Databases – Oracle/Mongo, SQL,  Monitoring tools, Terraform, Docker, Github, Kibana, Kafka, Lambda, Apache, Python, Perl, Tomcat CI/CD pipeline tools i.e. Concourse, AWS, Jira, Service now, slack, confluence.

Non technical: Agile Methodologies, and ITIL 4 Foundation. 

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Working Together
• Managing a Quality Service
• Making Effective Decisions

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £49,384, Companies House contributes £14,306 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

We believe that our success is driven by the well-being and satisfaction of our team members at all levels of the organisation. At Companies House we’re committed to providing a comprehensive benefits package that goes beyond the ordinary, ensuring your career journey with us is not only fulfilling, but also rewarding. We pride ourselves on offering a quality work-life balance with our employee wellbeing being central to our working practices. 

Head to Our benefits - Working for us - Recruitment (companieshouse.gov.uk) to find out more about the fantastic benefits package we have at Companies House.  

We celebrate diversity... 

As an equal opportunity employer, we celebrate diversity, being committed to ensuring we’re representative of the citizens we serve and creating an inclusive environment. Everyone in Companies House brings something different, and so will you. To fulfil our commitment to recruiting and attracting diverse talent we welcome applications from underrepresented groups. We also welcome applications from Welsh speakers. 

We are proud to be a disability confident leader.  Our recruitment process is fully inclusive and we can make adjustments as needed through our process. These could include having an interview buddy, extra time at interviews/assessments and receiving interview questions in advance, to name a few. We will be happy to discuss any person-centred adjustments, please contact us by emailing recruitmentCH@companieshouse.gov.uk 

Where will you be working? 

You will be aligned to our Cardiff Office, where we are currently using a hybrid approach to the way we work. Our approach to hybrid working provides opportunities for you to be adaptable in the way you work so that you can achieve a healthy balance between your work and home life. The degree of choice you have will depend on business needs, your role and your day-to-day work activities and will be discussed at offer stage. Remote contracts can be discussed with your line manager.  

Things you need to know

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours, Strengths and Experience.

In your application form we’d like you to:

1. Tell us about your employment history, including key responsibilities and achievements.
2. We’d like you to write a personal statement of 1250 words where you tell us about why you’d be great for this role – we'd like you to particularly include your experience and technical skills that match what we’ve asked for in the job description and person specification, with a focus on the top 6 experience bullet points (in bold) and the technical section of the personal statement.  

At sift candidates will be assessed against the experience and technical skills listed in the advert and are asked to supply work history/personal statement and reference any transferable skills using the job description for reference.  Your personal statement should refer to the top 6 experience bullet points and technical skills listed in the person specification.  

At interview candidates will be assessed against the behaviours listed in the advert and we will use Success Profiles Behaviours and Strengths. As part of the interview process, there may be an activity to complete.  

We’re committed to being diverse and inclusive, so please make your application anonymous by removing all identifying personal information (such as names and dates) from your employment history and personal statement.

We understand that you might use AI and other resources for your application; however, please ensure all information you provide is factually accurate, truthful, and original and doesn’t include ideas or work that isn’t your own. This is so that your application is authentically and credibly your own.

What will the process look like?

• We’ll carry out a sift of applications and successful candidates at sift will be invited to interview, where we’ll explore your skills, experiences, the behaviours mentioned in the advert and your strengths.
• There may also be an activity as part of the interview process.

Read more information and guidance about Applying for Your New Job.   

Companies House uses a blended interview technique, allowing us to find out more about you. We use the Success Profile framework and may include Strength based questions in the interview.