Senior Applications Operations Engineer

Job summary

The Senior Applications Operations Engineer is a senior technical and people leader responsible for ensuring the operational resilience, performance, security, and continual improvement of a broad portfolio of enterprise applications that support critical organisational services.

Working with a high degree of autonomy, the role provides expert leadership across application operations, incident and problem management, service improvement, operational change, and technical assurance.

The post holder acts as a senior escalation point for complex or high-impact issues, making sound, evidence-based decisions that balance service continuity, user experience, security, and value for money.

This is a role for someone who can lead beyond day-to-day support. The successful candidate will set and embed technical standards, strengthen operational practices, develop Applications Operations Engineers, and ensure services are managed in line with organisational priorities, governance requirements, and recognised good practice.

The role also works closely with architecture, delivery, cyber security, suppliers, and service management colleagues to ensure applications are operable by design, sustainable at scale, and ready to support future organisational needs.

Senior Applications Operations Engineers are expected to influence service roadmaps, identify operational risks and opportunities, and drive continual improvement across multiple services rather than focusing only on individual applications.

This is an opportunity to play a key role in shaping how critical enterprise applications are operated, improved, and protected, while leading others and contributing to a modern, resilient, and user-focused application service.

The Crown Prosecution Service is based in England and Wales. If you’re applying for this role and live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you must let us know when accepting this offer as you need permission to work from your home address if hybrid working is part of your role. There’s no guarantee that we will grant this approval.

You must be aged 16 or over at the point of starting in this role. The expected start date is approximately 8–12 weeks after the application closing date. Candidates are expected to commence employment as soon as possible following the expiry of their notice period. Requests for significantly later start dates may not be accommodated.

As part of this role, you are expected to undertake direct line management responsibilities.

This role is available as a full time position only. However, if you have any flexible working requests, please email [email removed]

Job description

Your roles and responsibilities:

• Own and assure application service health: Take end-to-end accountability for the stability, performance, security and resilience of critical enterprise applications, ensuring live services meet organisational demand and deliver value.
• Lead incident and operational management: Drive the response to major incidents, complex issues and service risks, making timely, evidence-based decisions and ensuring lessons learned translate into sustained service improvements.
• Provide technical leadership and develop engineers: Set clear technical direction, manage and coach the Applications Operations team, build capability, and foster a culture of learning, knowledge sharing and continuous improvement.
• Embed best practice and influence service design: Work across service management, delivery, architecture, security and suppliers to ensure applications are operable by design, scalable and aligned to user needs through effective change and roadmap planning.
• Manage risk and guide decision-making: Assess and challenge technical and operational risks, assure readiness and non-functional requirements, and provide clear, balanced recommendations that consider continuity, security, cost and long-term sustainability.

A copy of the full job description is attached.

Person specification

To be eligible to apply, it is essential that you have the following..

Running M365 services day to day

Experience managing core Microsoft 365 services like Exchange Online, SharePoint, Teams and Entra ID

Able to keep services stable, available and performing well for users

Handling major incidents

Experienced in leading the response to serious service issues

Able to bring the right people together, make decisions quickly and restore service

Improving services over time

Able to spot recurring issues and take action to fix them properly

Uses monitoring, data and user feedback to make services better

Leading and developing engineers

Experience managing or supporting engineers in a team

Able to set clear direction, share knowledge and help others develop their skills

It is desirable that you have the below experience but this is not required to apply:

Risk awareness and service assurance

Experience understanding risks to services and helping reduce them

Awareness of things like resilience, security and testing before changes go live

M365 security, identity and compliance

Experience of working with tools like Entra ID, Conditional Access and Microsoft Purview.

General understanding of how access, identity and data protection are managed

Automation and scripting

Experience using PowerShell or similar tools to automate routine tasks

Able to reduce manual effort and improve consistency

Working with stakeholders and suppliers

Experience working with different teams and external partners

Able to communicate clearly and challenge where needed to improve services

Using data to make decisions

Comfortable using reports, dashboards and service data

Able to explain what the data means and support decision-making

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Making Effective Decisions
• Developing Self and Others

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £43,800, Crown Prosecution Service contributes £12,688 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

Join the Crown Prosecution Service and find your purpose.

The Crown Prosecution Service is passionate about ensuring that we're a top performing organisation and a great place to work. We're a committed equal opportunities employer, creating a culture where you can bring your whole self to work, and individuality is truly appreciated.

This culture of inclusion is underpinned by our staff networks covering disability, faith and belief, LGBTQI+, race, social mobility alongside our mental health first aiders programme and wellbeing sessions.

The Crown Prosecution Service commits to offer its employees the following experience.

• You can do impactful, purposeful work that’s making a difference to your local communities.
• You are able to learn and grow, with access to the right opportunities and resources.
• We care about your wellbeing.
• We want you to feel valued, trusted and included.

We also offer the following range of benefits:

• Civil Service contributory pension of up to 28.9%
• 25 days’ leave, increasing to 30 days after 5 years