Senior Development Engineer - MHCLG - G7

Location

Bristol, Darlington, London, Manchester, Wolverhampton

About the job

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 and better use of data. The Planning Data Team is delivering the foundational data infrastructure and services that support this transformation.

As a Senior Development Engineer (DevOps), you will lead the design and implementation of the deployment, monitoring, and infrastructure systems that underpin the planning data services. You will ensure our development and production environments are reliable, secure, scalable, and support continuous delivery. This is a senior engineering role that combines hands-on infrastructure development with technical leadership and mentoring.

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

As a Senior Development Engineer you'll:

• Design, implement, and manage cloud infrastructure (primarily AWS) to support development, staging, and production environments
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, utilising Github Actions, AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeDeploy, automating the testing, integration, and deployment of software and data services
• Lead the design and operation of secure, observable systems aligned with best practices in DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering
• Collaborate with software developers, data engineers, analysts, and product managers to deliver and support robust digital services
• Develop and manage infrastructure-as-code using Terraform
• Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting solutions to ensure high availability and performance of planning data services
• Ensure infrastructure meets compliance and security requirements, including Government Digital Service standards and National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) guidance
• Provide technical leadership within the team, mentor junior engineers, and promote DevOps best practices across the wider Digital Planning Programme

Person specification

As a Senior Development Engineer you'll have:

• Familiarity with secure software development and deployment practices
• Experience working in agile teams and DevOps cultures, supporting iterative delivery
• Proven experience in designing, building, and managing cloud-based infrastructure (e.g. AWS: EC2, Lambda, ECS, RDS, S3, Distributed version control with Git)
• Strong experience with CI/CD tooling (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or GitLab CI)
• Proficiency in infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Understanding of containerisation and orchestration (e.g., Docker, ECS, EKS, Kubernetes)
• Experience monitoring production systems using tools such as CloudWatch, Prometheus, ELK/Elastic Stack
• Experience with serverless technologies (e.g., AWS Lambda, Step Functions, ECS Fargate, EMR serverless AWS Glue)
• Experience with open-source contributions, public APIs, or open data services
• Knowledge of government standards, including the GDS Service Standard and Technology Code of Practice
• Understanding of zero-downtime deployment techniques and blue/green or canary deployment strategies