Distinguished Engineer (Contact Engagement Platform) - HMRC - SCS1

Location

Bristol, Leeds, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Stratford, Telford

About the job

Job summary

This is a unique opportunity to join HMRC as a Distinguished Engineer, providing technical leadership for one of the most critical set of platforms in the organisation. In this role, you will shape and deliver the engineering strategy for the Contact Engagement Platform, driving innovation, improving developer experience, and ensuring our technology enables seamless, secure, and scalable customer interactions. You’ll act as a key bridge between engineering and business strategy, influencing senior stakeholders and aligning technical delivery with HMRC’s broader transformation goals.

Job description

• Provide Technical Leadership: As the senior technical leader within the Software Development and Management Practice, you'll be accountable for developing and delivering the engineering technical strategy for the Contact Engagement Platform. You'll inspire and support engineering teams to deliver high-quality work on time. You’ll work with a community of suppliers and permanent engineers and set performance expectations for both.
• Drive Innovation and Strategy: The role requires you to "think big" on technology, drive innovation within platforms, and ensure the use of the right technologies to increase speed to market and productivity, while maintaining security and reliability. You'll also be responsible for the "Developer Experience" (DevEx), ensuring engineers are supported within the platforms.
• Bridge the Gap: You will connect the engineering functions of the Chief Engineering and Platform Office (CEPO) and the Customer-facing Digital and Platform Office (CDPO), aligning technical requirements with appropriate roadmaps. You will also provide robust challenge and support to the Enterprise Architecture functions. You will help our engineering platforms ‘get out of the way’ of service teams.
• Engage and Influence Stakeholders: This is an executive-level engineering role where you will work with Director Generals and their Senior Leadership Teams. You'll provide leadership to align business delivery with platform architecture and services, engage with other IT leaders, and represent HMRC's engineering capability to the wider government community.
• Motivate and Nurture: You will help develop talent pipelines feeding into the Contact Engagement Platform and wider, developing junior engineers and supporting pathways for school leavers and graduates. You will represent the Government Digital and Data (GDaD) profession schemes within HMRC and across other Government departments, and you will champion ‘Engineering’ as a first-class occupation within the Civil Service.
• Practical Application of Skills: This is a hands-on role, you won’t be cutting code every day, but you will fully understand a modern Software Development Life Cycle and how to apply it properly. When appropriate you will be joining pairs and mobbing on complex problems.

Person specification

• Exceptional Leadership and Influence: You will be an excellent leader and manager with a proven track record of building, leading, and influencing highly skilled technical teams and driving cultural change. You must be able to influence senior stakeholders, providing clear advice to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Strategic & Hands-on Technical Expertise: Due to the nature of this role, you must be both strategic and hands-on. This includes expert-level knowledge in building and maintaining software solutions in a multi-cloud environment, a deep understanding of modern DevSecOps and Secure Software Development Lifecycle methodologies, and experience with continuous delivery and running systems at scale. You will be able to embrace modern and cutting edge approaches and used evidence based decision making in their adoption.
• Proven Innovation and Technical Foresight: You must constantly scan for new technologies, understand how they can solve business problems, and be able to create business cases and lead proof-of-concept projects. Experience in containerised application development, building engineering reference architectures, and capitalising on AI solutions to improve platforms is essential.
• Strong Communication & Interpersonal Skills: The ability to communicate a technical vision to all levels of management, business partners, and technical staff is critical. You must be able to secure consensus from a wide group of stakeholders and demonstrate expert-level interaction with senior leadership.