Senior DevOps Engineer - Ministry of Justice - G7

Location

East Midlands (England), East of England, London (region), North East England, North West England, Scotland, South East England, South West England, Wales, West Midlands (England), Yorkshire and the Humber

About the job

Job summary

This position is based Nationally

Job description

As a Senior DevOps Engineer at HMCTS you will work with a wide range of stakeholders such as user researchers, product managers, designers, business analysts, delivery managers and digital architects, all of whom share a vision for making better government through smarter use of technology. You will innovate to radically transform public services for the better. 

You will be responsible for maintaining and evolving our Wowza and Camunda instances in our Production environment as well as working with our Software Development teams to help improve our DevOps practices.  

Examples of our other products can be found in our GitHub repository: 

• https://github.com/hmcts 

You can find more information about our ways of working in the HMCTS Way: https://hmcts.github.io 

Technologies we rely heavily on: 

• Java and Spring Boot to write our backend services 
• Node.js to write our frontend services 
• Power Platform for low-code development 
• Jenkins for CI/CD 
• Dynatrace for application monitoring 
• Kubernetes and Docker to run our services 
• Azure for most of our infrastructure 
• Terraform for infrastructure as code 
• Postgres and Redis as our databases. 
• GOV.UK Design System for our web interfaces 
• Macs to do all the above 
• In addition, we use a range of other technologies and continue to evolve by employing new technologies that help us deliver better services to our user 

Key Responsibilities: 

• Design, build, maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment tooling and engineering standards across services and platforms. 
• Transform technical requirements into effective DevOps tooling and processes that enable safe, fast and reliable product delivery. 
• Ensure deployment strategies are repeatable, scalable, resilient and highly available across multiple environments. 
• Automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration and operational tasks using infrastructure as code and scripting. 
• Support and maintain live services, including incident response, troubleshooting, root cause analysis and problem management. 
• Provide deep technical support to delivery teams, identify bottlenecks and solve complex operational problems. 
• Implement and improve observability, including monitoring, alerting, logging, dashboards and service health checks. 
• Apply security best practice across the delivery lifecycle, including secrets management, patching, vulnerability management and secure by design approaches. 
• Manage service availability, performance and capacity in a way that is effective, measurable and cost conscious. 
• Coach and mentor junior colleagues, promote knowledge sharing and support the development of DevOps capability across the organisation. 
• Participate in recruitment, procurement and supplier engagement where required. 
• Support planned and occasional urgent out-of-hours work for releases, pipeline updates, smoke testing, incidents and essential maintenance. 

Essential Criteria: 

• Strong experience designing and operating cloud native platforms and deployment pipelines in enterprise environments. 
• Hands on expertise with infrastructure as code and automation tooling, for example Terraform and scripting languages such as Bash, Python or Groovy. 
• Experience with containerisation and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes. 
• Strong understanding of CI/CD practices, source control, build tooling and release automation. 
• Experience of supporting and improving live services, including incident management, service support, monitoring and operational troubleshooting. 
• Knowledge of platform security, including identity and access management, secrets management, vulnerability mitigation and secure engineering practices. 
• Ability to design scalable, resilient and supportable solutions, with an understanding of networking, certificates, APIs and systems integration. 

Desirable 

• Experience supporting media/video streaming platforms such as Wowza and/or workflow or orchestration platforms such as Camunda. 

Working pattern and out-of-hours support 

This role supports live digital services and deployment pipelines. Candidates should be aware that the role requires some flexible working outside standard office hours. 

This includes supporting pipeline updates outside normal working hours and completing checks to confirm services have not been affected, Monday to Friday. Where an issue is found during the 8am smoke test, the expectation is that it is investigated and corrected as soon as possible, with the aim of restoring service before 9am. 

Where both roles are in post, cover will be required across the core working day of 8am to 5pm, Monday to Friday. Major Wowza image upgrades can only take place after 7pm during the working week.