Senior DevOps Engineer
Home Office Digital, Data and Technology -
About Us
We have many truly exciting initiatives coming together which are reshaping how we deliver digital services now and in the future. Our product teams are passionate about crafting platforms and products for our users.
You could be designing and building solutions to help people prove their identity or apply for visas or working on the critical IT systems that support policing and counter terrorism and help protect UK borders.
We think that these are some of the most interesting and exciting projects in government right now, and we look forward to finding the right person to help us deliver them.
Take a look at our recent blog post on DevOps within the Home Office - https://hodigital.blog.gov.uk/2020/09/15/what-are-we-doing-in-devops-at-the-home-office
What you'll be doing
Working in a product-centric development team, you'll be bringing deep DevOps skills and SRE awareness to build services and bring them into full production operation. You'll work closely across the team to engineer for reliability, maintainability, performance and security and play a key role in diagnosing service issues and devising and implementing permanent enhancements to infrastructure and tooling.
Working with the wider DevOps and SRE community, you'll enhance and improve patterns, frameworks and tooling that keeps services reliable and operating at scale. We have a number of DevOps toolchains. Primally we run docker, Kubernetes and Terraform.
We want you to administrate and support these toolchains and feed into the technical direction that these platforms should take. You’ll be proficient in the field of DevOps and be you’ll care about automation, security, fixing complex issues and consider a problem ticket a chance to deliver changes.
Your key responsibilities
- implementing optimisations and automations that reduce technical debt; reduce operational costs and risks; automate toil; and improve the quality and resilience of our service infrastructure
- spotting instances where teams are not using best practice; advising around delivery risk, e.g. code quality analysis tools support in
- developing delivery pipelines using GitLab and Jenkins for deployments into our path-to-live environments across multiple services.
- undertaking skilled platform build/support activities, such as developing hardened base containers, deploying platform services through a CI pipeline making use of infrastructure as code
- supporting engineers in service topology discovery; helping to define QA anddeployment pipelines
- driving adoption of new tools so teams can improve their integration approaches
What we offer
To sweeten the offer, we’re one of the largest consumers of cloud services in the UK, and we make use of many vendors and technologies. We understand that continuous learning is extremely important an an engineer. To support you we will give you the materials and time to grow yourself. Additionally, you’ll have the support of a rapidly growing engineering community!
We work at scale, and we have the tech stack to support this, delivering services to millions of people across the United Kingdom. If you want to be part of this, whether already working at this level or looking to make your next career move, it’s time to share your CV and make a difference.
About you
You’ll also have strong skills or experience:
- in development of code or scripts to provide automation and consistent deployment patterns in at least one major programming/scripting language
- with AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform/Cloudformation, Vault and modern monitoring tooling systems
- engineering and maintaining DevOps toolchains to support secure and highly resilient services
- developing designs, code and testing of infrastructure as code and continuous improvement pipelines
- building and installing of new platform tooling solutions such as monitoring, secret management and service discovery solutions to industry best practices
- working in an agile software development environment, including iterative design, planning and improvement
Some of the benefits our engineers love!
- one of the higher starting salaries across the Civil Service
- a Civil Service pension with employer contribution rates of between 26.6% and 30.3%, depending upon salary
- 25 days annual leave on appointment, plus 8 days public holidays and 1 day for the Queen’s Birthday, rising further with service
- flexible working options to enable you to achieve the work life balance that right for you including part-time, flexi time and job sharing
- training and development opportunities tailored to your role
- an in-year bonus scheme
- a culture encouraging inclusion and diversity
- season ticket loans and rental deposit loans
- cycle to work and payroll giving
- employee discounts - including a huge number of retailers (via the Edenred platform), Microsoft Home Use programme and gym membership
- a variety of staff recognition schemes including thank you vouchers
- health and wellbeing initiatives including monthly mindfulness sessions
- staff support networks
- maternity, adoption or shared parental leave of up to 26 weeks full pay followed by 13 weeks of statutory pay and a further 13 weeks unpaid
- maternity and adoption support leave (paternity leave) of 2 weeks full pay
- up to 5 days paid leave for volunteering
- study leave and support for studying for a qualification or other accredited development relevant to your role
