Senior DevOps Engineer

Job summary

Join our innovative tech team as a Senior DevOps Engineer and help shape the experience that our devs have while we deliver services together. We’re looking for an empathetic and experienced engineer to develop and support working systems and services that encapsulate RoS policies and standards and make them rewarding to use. You’ll have the opportunity to work with a talented and collaborative team where you’ll work on interesting projects using modern technologies and have impact beyond your individual contribution. You will have line management responsibility for more junior colleagues and contribute to capability building across the organisation.

The team

Development Enablement is an enablement team focussed on getting good results for about 130 technical doers across a dozen(ish) product delivery teams. Four other enablement teams together support around 1300 staff in RoS.

Job description

This role is based on the UK Gov’s DDAT Senior DevOps Engineer: https://ddat-capability-framework.service.gov.uk/role/development-operations-devops-engineer#senior-dev-ops-engineer:

• Design, implement and improve DevOps tooling and engineering workflows that enable secure, efficient and reliable product delivery, meeting the needs of users, delivery teams and service operators.

• Build, maintain and continuously improve deployment pipelines and release processes so services are repeatable, scalable, resilient and highly available.

• Provide technical leadership and hands on support to multidisciplinary delivery teams, helping to resolve complex engineering issues and improve platform performance, reliability and maintainability.

• Coach, mentor and line manage junior colleagues, supporting their development and contributing to capability building across the wider engineering community.

• Work collaboratively with product, engineering and operational colleagues to apply RoS standards, security requirements and good operational practice across the software lifecycle.

• Manage service components to ensure they meet business needs, performance targets and agreed service levels.

• Identify opportunities to improve delivery processes and contribute to implementing practical, sustainable improvements.

• Design and build solutions with appropriate security controls that reduce risk and help protect services, systems and data.

• Apply modern engineering standards, patterns and ways of working consistently, and support others to do the same.

• Design, code, test and document software or infrastructure solutions of medium to high complexity, using agreed standards, tools and engineering practices.

• Use prototyping as a collaborative team activity to test ideas, explore options and iterate towards effective technical solutions.

• Identify, investigate and resolve complex live service issues, and provide expert advice to others on service support approaches and recovery options.

• Work with user researchers and delivery colleagues to understand user needs, represent users in technical discussions and help shape solutions that improve user outcomes.

Person specification

Essential & Technical Experience: We will assess you against the following Experience skills during the application and assessment process

Essential Experience

• Significant experience in software, platform or DevOps engineering roles

• Experience leading platform or infrastructure improvement work

• Experience supporting agile delivery in cross functional teams

• Experience mentoring others and contributing to engineering practice

• Experience delivering measurable service or platform outcomes

Technical Experience

• Secure, scalable cloud native and containerised platforms

• CI/CD, automation and infrastructure as code

• Observability, resilience and operational support

• Building reusable tooling, APIs and self-service capabilities

• Writing maintainable infrastructure code and automation scripts

Behaviours

At application stage, you will be scored against the bolded Behaviours and against the remaining all Behaviours for the assessment:

Leadership

• You will provide technical leadership across platform and DevOps engineering, helping shape ways of working, standards, patterns and that support secure, scalable and reliable delivery.

• You will take ownership of complex work, guide others through ambiguity and support the team to deliver high-quality outcomes across the software lifecycle.

• You will mentor and support colleagues through coaching, pairing, code reviews and knowledge sharing, helping build capability across the wider engineering community, including direct line management of other colleagues.

Managing a Quality Service

• You will design, build and maintain resilient platform services that enable delivery teams to release high-quality software safely and efficiently.

• You will use automation, observability, testing and secure engineering practices to improve service reliability, reduce operational risk and minimise disruption for users.

• You will drive continuous improvement by identifying service issues, learning from incidents and using evidence and feedback to improve platform performance and developer experience.

Making Effective Decisions

• You will make sound technical decisions on platform design, tooling, automation and release approaches, using evidence, engineering insight and business need to guide your judgement.

• You will assess risks, dependencies and trade-offs when resolving problems or planning improvements, balancing pace of delivery with service resilience, security and long term sustainability.

• You will use data, monitoring insight and team input to make informed decisions on priorities, incident response and platform improvements.

Working Together

• You will work closely with developers, product colleagues, security specialists and other stakeholders to deliver platform capabilities that meet shared goals and user needs.

• You will build effective working relationships across multidisciplinary teams, communicating clearly and contributing constructively to technical discussions, planning and problem solving.

• You will support a collaborative team culture by sharing knowledge, valuing different perspectives and contributing to communities of practice and shared engineering initiatives.

Behaviours

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

• Managing a Quality Service
• Making Effective Decisions
• Working Together
• Leadership

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £62,301, Registers of Scotland contributes £18,048 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).

• Learning and development tailored to your role
• An environment with flexible working options
• A culture enc