Lead Infrastructure Engineer - DfE - G7

The Department for Education is seeking to recruit Infrastructure Engineers to work across multiple endeavours. We continually seek new innovative opportunities for efficiencies, economies of scale and new value to users across established cloud computing platforms to make them better for users, increase value for money and reduce complexity.

Infrastructure Engineers in the Department design, build, operate and support IT infrastructure resources that underpin internal user services and services to the public. If you are successful, you will work as part of a team providing a range of capabilities and may operate across one or more contexts including the following:

Hosting environments and landing zone management: Security, management, governance and automation of DfE’s centrally managed hosting environments and cloud landing zones. Includes design, build, operate and maintain core cloud computing IT infrastructure services, ensuring that they remain available, secure, performant, and that they continue to meet requirements.

Managed infrastructure service: Build, operate & maintain cloud and on-premises infrastructure resources for business applications. Updates and patching, back-up & restore, security vulnerability management, capacity management, service optimisation, incident resolution, request fulfilment, service controls, and asset management.

Service improvement: Develop new, and enhance existing IT infrastructure products, services or processes to simplify infrastructure, enhance security, improve reliability & performance, avoid costs, scale & expand, prevent legacy, meet new requirements, or address emergent problem statements.

These posts are in Enterprise Data. Data plays a key role in achieving the department’s vision; Within Enterprise Data we are striving to make DfE a data-led organisation, where we can have responsive decisions that leads to better outcomes for all children, young people and adults.  Our Infrastructure Engineers help deliver that by working in a multidisciplinary team to provision, support and maintain cloud solutions (through Infrastructure as Code) as directed and according to departmental policy.  The roles within Enterprise Data are also responsible for supporting the Informatica Data Engineering Integration (DEI) tool so need a good working knowledge of Informatica tools (Informatica Admin / connectors / internal networking / database connectivity) and Linux (RedHat).

Job description

As a Lead Infrastructure Engineer in the Department for Education you will work within a user centred, agile environment leading and directing Infrastructure Engineers. You will provide technical leadership and support to build, operate and maintain the Department’s cloud infrastructure services which underpin all internal business services and services to the public, predominantly within Microsoft Azure environments and landing zones.

Under direction, you will provide technical leadership to deliver improvements to modernise how cloud resources are deployed and managed, remove legacy ways of working, and deliver initiatives to help mature the Department’s cloud computing platform including implementing solution architectures to enable cloud users to work in a consistent manner. You will:

• Work with technical architects to translate architectural designs into operable solutions.
• Transform technical requirements into automated processes using modern standards approaches such as Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Act as an advocate of cloud computing including Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) so that the Department and its partners can embrace the government’s Cloud First policy.
• Create and sustain modern deployment and management standards, practices, and techniques for our cloud resources.
• Lead, support, coach, and mentor less experienced Infrastructure Engineers in managing, supporting and maintaining the Department’s infrastructure.
• Advocate user-centric, agile approaches which focus on rapid, effective delivery of high-quality digital services.

Person specification

Essential Criteria:

Assessed in the application and both interview stages:

• Experience of providing technical leadership to motivate, manage and guide a team towards shared goals to design, build, configure, operate and maintain infrastructure resources in Microsoft Azure environments. Technologies include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software, tenants, management groups, subscriptions, identity & access, network topology and connectivity, certificate services, cryptographic key management, availability & performance monitoring, developer collaboration software, virtual desktop, virtual machines and update management.
• Experience leading and designing system integration builds to combine IT infrastructure components to create a consolidated solution; co-ordinating test and build activities across infrastructure services.
• Experience of driving forward the adoption of automation techniques to configure IT infrastructure services, automate processes and extract information.
• A good working knowledge of Informatica tools (Informatica Admin / connectors / internal networking / database connectivity) and Linux (RedHat).

Assessed in the application and the second interview stage:

• Experience of conveying technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience of designing, implementing and assuring security controls, options and configuration settings to protect cloud computing services, and to mitigate against security threats and vulnerabilities.
• Problem management. Experience identifying incident trends and coordinating actions to investigate, identify and resolve root causes; and organising Infrastructure Engineers to take forward preventive measures.
• Experience of providing technical leadership for troubleshooting activities; breaking down IT infrastructure incidents, diagnosing and rectifying root cause.

Desirable Criteria:

• Microsoft Azure verified credentials, certification or qualifications an advantage.
• Influencing service levels and service frameworks and how to operate within them to deliver, operate and maintain IT infrastructure services.
• Experience of developing and contributing to design standards.
• Experience of developing requirements and specifications, defining test conditions and analysing and reporting test activities and results.

Desirable criteria will only be assessed at interview, in the event of a tie break situation, to make an informed decision.