Lead Infrastructure Engineer - Home Office - G7

Location

Croydon CR0 2WF, Liverpool L3 9AF, Manchester M5 3LZ, Southport PR8 2HH

About the job

Job summary

Home Office Government Digital and Data designs, builds and develops services for the rest of the department and for government. Every year our systems support up to 3 million visa applications, checks on 100 million border crossings, up to 8 million passport applications, and delivers 140 million police checks on people, vehicles, and property.   

A Lead Infrastructure Engineer assumes responsibility for coordinating with third party provision of infrastructure services and the provision of expertise to deliver architectural solutions for infrastructure services throughout the service lifecycle.    

You will oversee programmes and projects and work with Technical Architects to translate architectural designs into operational systems and support technical architects. 

You will lead and direct infrastructure teams in building, managing, transitioning, supporting and maintaining solutions according to departmental policy and foster open feedback and continuous learning with service support to ensure continuous improvement. You are responsible for overall management activities such as workforce planning, budgeting, technology roadmaps, projects and tasks. 

Where business needs allow some roles may be suitable for a combination of office and home-based working. Where this is the case, employees will be expected to spend a minimum of 60% of their working time in the office. 

Watch this short video to hear from members of Home Office Digital talking about the projects they work on and their experience of working here: Working for Home Office Digital. 

Job description

We are looking to recruit 2 Lead Infrastructure Engineers across 2 teams.

1 Role - Within Enterprise Services (ES), the Cyber Team is responsible for securing Home Office cloud platforms through the implementation and ongoing maintenance of advanced security technologies. Your main focus initially will be to lead a team to promote and support the onboarding of assets to a protective monitoring service using Defender XDR features. You will act as a security subject matter expert within our security technology services team, offering specialised knowledge in administration, support, and the execution of project and product deliverables. Our team is committed to advancing intelligent solutions by utilising cutting-edge security capabilities.

1 Role – The Endpoint Experience team is the front end to all home office systems and services from the client perspective. We ensure end user devices and OS platforms are best fit for exceptional user experiences whilst also working closely with security and architecture teams. We develop many different controls and customisation depending on each area’s requirement. We are secure by design and align to modern security benchmarks. This includes laptops, smartphones, kiosks and virtual environments, along with the management of core applications across those platforms. The Lead Engineer will be responsible for the creation/validation of design, continual improvement and maintenance of these products working within a team of lead infrastructure engineers, engineers, delivery managers and product managers. In addition, the lead engineering role is responsible for technical road mapping, innovation and developing the engineering team capabilities. 

Tools and Technologies we use: 

We are keen for Engineers to continue learning new technologies, we have a large range in the Home Office including: 

Tools and Technologies we use: 

•  Microsoft M365, Samsung Knox, Apple Business Manager
• Azure Virtual Desktop, Nerdio, Windows365
• Nexthink
• Microsoft Entra
• Microsoft Defender XDR
• Automation Tools: PowerShell, Azure Runbooks, Azure Dev Ops Repos/Pipelines 

Person specification

Main responsibilities 

Your main day to day responsibilities will be:  

• Leading teams and departments in the implementation, administration and support of infrastructure solutions and services.
• Reviewing systems designs to ensure selection of appropriate technology, efficient use of resources, integration of multiple systems and technology and that ‘Secure by Design’ principles have been followed.
• Managing planning of system and/or acceptance tests, coordinating both functional and non-functional specifications and provide authoritative advice and guidance on test planning.
• Troubleshooting and identifying problems across different technology capabilities including compute, storage, networking, physical infrastructure, software, cloud, commercial off the shelf (COTS) and open source.
• Establishing standards and procedures across a service lifecycle including the development lifecycle and ensure that practitioners adhere to this. You will manage resources to ensure that the systems integration function works effectively.
• After a solution has been integrated, you will evaluate the success of the project, identifying best practices and lessons learned. You will provide feedback to teams and incorporate this information into future plans.
• Experience of providing technical leadership for troubleshooting activities; and problem management - identifying incident trends and coordinating actions to investigate, identify and resolve root causes. 
• Designing and developing security solutions based on user/business needs using appropriate security tooling. 

As our services operate 24/7, you may need to occasionally work outside of office hours, including participating in an on-call rota implementing technical changes, with additional pay for out-of-hours work and on-call. 

Essential skills criteria

You’ll have a visible passion for Infrastructure Engineering, with the following skills or strong experience in: 

• Agile development and continuous integration principles (DESN)
• Using appropriate testing and change control to safely and reliably deliver new features (TEST)
• Maintaining focus on the whole life cycle of service delivery; from design, development, and delivery through to operation (HSIN)
• Managing and delivering complex cloud technologies, as the Subject Matter Expert within time, cost and quality targets, whilst ensuring we provide the highest level of service to our customers and stakeholders. (ITOP)
• Dissecting a problem into its component parts to identify and diagnose root causes, allowing problem resolution (USUP)
• Providing direction and coaching to more junior members (OFCL)

SFIA capability framework 

Skills for the Information Age (SFIA) is the technical framework that sets the standard capability and development of all levels in the Home Office. This is a link to the capability framework:  All skills A - Z English (sfia-online.org). 

We use set SFIA technical skills to form our interview questions and we will assess you against these technical skills during the selection process. 

The essential skills listed above are reflective of the Home Office Government Digital and Data Profession Career Framework (based on the industry standard SFIA framework).  Use the SFIA levels of responsibility to understand what would be expected for each technical skills listed below.