Lead DevOps Engineer

Job summary

The UKHSA Development and Operations team leads the digital transformation of UKHSA to make it a more data driven, customer focused, digital organisation. We do this by delivering services which meet and maintain the Government Digital Service (GDS) Digital by Default Service Standard.

DevOps Engineers at UKHSA work collaboratively with developers and stakeholders such as Data Scientists and Public Health officials to deliver secure, scalable, and reliable software solutions that support the agency’s mission and critical public health services. We employ modern best practices to deliver projects quickly, safely, and cost-effectively.

As a Lead DevOps Engineer you will manage a small team, acting as technical product owner and contributing to the development of strategic direction. You will be a recognised expert in modern development standards and systems integration, bringing deep technical knowledge to lead the sharing of good practice, coach and mentor colleagues, and develop medium to long term strategies for our DevOps toolchains and platforms.

Job description

• Acting as technical product owner & developing medium to long term strategies for product lines & our CI/CD toolchain estate
• Apply expert knowledge of modern development standards to support complex projects & programmes, leading others in applying these standards consistently across teams
• Lead the sharing of knowledge & best practices across the DevOps engineering team, providing technical leadership and guidance through coaching and mentoring
• Establish & maintain systems integration standards and procedures across the service product life cycle, ensuring practitioners adhere to them and managing resources to ensure effective integration delivery
• Provide expert-level service support — identifying, locating and fixing complex service faults — and advise others on different methodologies and types of service support
• Design solutions & services with security controls included, specifically engineered to mitigate security threats, applying practitioner-level information security skills across the teams you lead
• Drive continuous improvement by identifying and implementing process optimisation opportunities across DDO
• Design & assure business-critical systems, review technical solutions to ensure effective, scalable and cost-efficient outcomes
• Champion user-centred design, representing user needs & promoting the use of research to inform decisions
• Manage service components to ensure delivery against business objectives & key performance indicators (KPIs).

Role Purpose

• As a Lead DevOps Engineer, you will shape UKHSA’s DevOps strategy & act as technical product owner for product lines within Digital Development and Operations. You'll be a recognised technical leader, give expert knowledge of modern development standards & systems integration to promote quality, consistency & good practice.
• Provide technical leadership, coaching and mentoring, and develop medium- to long-term strategies for DevOps toolchains, CI/CD pipelines & platforms. You'll have experience designing highly available cloud services, particularly on AWS, and implementing CI/CD and infrastructure automation using technologies such as Ansible and Terraform. Working across AWS and Azure, you will develop and support services and infrastructure through to production.

Core Responsibilities

• Identify & apply modern development standards to support complex projects & programmes across the teams you lead.
• Act as technical product owner to develop medium to long term strategies for product lines and our CI/CD toolchain estate.
• Contribute to development of UKHSA’s DevOps strategic direction
• Technical leadership & guidance.
• Establish, maintain systems integration standards and procedures across the service and development lifecycle
• Coordinate resources, integration testing and build activities to ensure effective integration
• Diagnose & resolve complex service faults using advanced technical and diagnostic expertise.
• Advise teams on service support approaches and methodologies
• Design secure solutions with controls proportionate to mitigate security threats & risks.
• Ensure teams apply appropriate security standards throughout the development lifecycle.
• Design complex systems that impact the organisation,
• Review system designs to ensure effective technology selection, resource use and integration across systems.
• Design, develop, test & document medium-to-high complexity programs and scripts
• Identify process optimisation opportunities contribute to the implementation of solutions.
• Manage service components to ensure they meet business needs and KPIs.
• Champion user-centred design by advocating for user research, representing user needs, and helping teams prioritise and understand user requirements.
• Lead collaborative prototyping, developing and refining design patterns.

This list is not exhaustive

Person specification

Essential Criteria

• Expert-level modern development standards, systems integration and service support, leading others in development standards across complex programmes; establishing integration standards across the product lifecycle; diagnosing and resolving complex service faults and advising on support methodologies.
• Practitioner-level information security, systems design and programming — designing solutions with security controls to mitigate threats; designing medium-complexity systems; coding and documenting programs or scripts of medium-to-high complexity.
• Practitioner-level user focus — working with user researchers, championing user-centred approaches and guiding teams in prioritising user needs.
• Experience with cloudautomation technologies (Ansible, Terraform) and implementing CI/CD platforms (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) using repeatable deployment patterns.
• Experience acting as technical product owner for a project team or product line, contributing to medium to long term technical strategy.
• Excellent communication skills across technical and non-technical boundaries, with the ability to represent complex engineering decisions clearly to stakeholders.
• Degree in computer science or equivalent, with a genuine passion for DevOps, cloud automation and version control (Git).

Desirable Criteria

• Experience with containerisation technologies (e.g. Docker) and Kubernetes-based container platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift.
• Understanding of RESTful Web Services.
• Familiarity with the GDS Service Standard and Technology Code of Practice.
• Contributing to DevOps or platform strategy at programme or organisational level.
• Experience in a government, public health or regulated environment.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £56,185, UK Health Security Agency contributes £16,276 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).

We pride ourselves as being an employer of choice, promoting equality of opportunity to actively encourage applications from everyone, including groups currently underrepresented in our workforce. UKHSA's ethos is to be an inclusive organisation for all our staff and stakeholders. To create, nurture and sustain an inclusive culture, wher