Lead WebOps/DevOps Engineer - Companies House - SEO
Government Digital & Data -
Job summary
We are looking for an enthusiastic Lead WebOps and DevOps Engineer working directly to the Principal WebOps DevOps Engineer (Senior Lead) with great leadership and technical skills and a drive to improve the team. You will be responsible for the leadership of the technical teams at Companies House Web and Development Operations, which are a 24x7 team. You will be user and service focused ensuring that value is delivered through improvement and automation of delivery pipelines, service and application support.
Companies House offers a flexible and welcoming culture that promotes a healthy work life balance as well as a proactive approach to wellbeing that allows us to be our best at work. We recognise that people are the key to our success so offer a fantastic benefits package including flexible working with no core hours, 30 days annual leave, 8 bank holidays and 1 privilege day as well as enrolment into the Civil Service Pension scheme with a contribution rate averaging 28%.
Find out more about what a great place Companies House is to work
Job description
Key Deliverables:
- A strong leader with the ability to motivate and sometimes in difficult times, ensuring a focus on career development and innovation while supporting the wellbeing of colleagues. Including Mentoring and leading less experienced members of the team.
- Transparent, flexible and proactive in your approach to build productive working relationships with your manager, team and other departments are key for the teams and your success.
- Managing and delivering business priorities within a complex landscape of process and technology change.
- Proven Technical background ability to lead a highly skilled hard-working team.
- Lead and support any Incident/Problem to resolution across IT services.
- Will require to do adhoc reporting and data management as and when needed.
- Making sure availability of Web Applications to the public target of 99.5% are adhered to.
- Ensure the correct implementation of standards and procedures. You can identify documentation, capacity issues, monitoring, alerting, performance and stipulating the required changes and instigating these. You know how to initiate remedial action across your team and across other areas of Companies House.
- Keeping abreast and understand the direction for future technologies and the changing architectural landscape within Companies House, and ability to articulate that to your manager and team.
** You will also be expected to participate in the on-call rota for your section in line with the current on call agreement to ensure our services remain operational at all times. This on-call element covers 24/7/365 and is an essential requirement of the role.
Person specification
We're looking for the following, which will be assessed at sift and at interview. Please refer to the experience (top 3, in bold) and technical bullet point (top 1, in bold) below when writing your personal statement.
Experience - Please refer to the 3 bold bullet points in your personal statement
- Demonstrable Incident/Problem resolution management. Be at the forefront in the investigation and resolution of incidents, and any write ups with the principal. Help resolve any issues that occur and proactively searching for potential solutions ensuring the right actions are taken to investigate, resolve and anticipate future problems in a timely manner.
- Experience of Performance tuning, monitoring and alerting others.
- Understanding of DevOps and Continuous Integration, Delivery methods and techniques.
- Demonstrable experience of ensuring high availability of systems, for example we would expect you to work with your Principal to agreed service levels (currently 99.5% availability).
- Manage complex 24x7 high availability Web Applications systems.
- Preferable development background with experience in scripting, Linux systems, development languages, databases will be an advantage.
- Mentor, lead and ensure the less experienced members of the team are upskilled.
- Ensure the correct implementation of standards and procedures. You can identify capacity issues, stipulating the required changes and instigating these. You know how to initiate remedial action.
- You understand the direction for future technologies.
- Rapid delivery of user centric services whilst focussing on performance.
- Experience of managing technical teams in a high-pressure environment, but able to bond with the team and develop their technical journeys.
Technical - Please refer to the top bullet point (in bold) in your personal statement
- Unix & Shell Scripting, XML, Databases – Oracle/Mongo, SQL, Monitoring tools, Kibana, Kafka, AWS.
- Lambda, Apache, Python, Perl, CI/CD pipeline tools i.e. Concourse, Jira, Service now, slack, confluence.
- Agile Methodologies and ITIL 4 Foundation.
About the team
Front End Systems Support (FESS). The FESS team look after all the live (and test) web services, for example CHS (and sub services like Apply to be Secure and Emergency Auth code services), Webfiling, Software filing (XMLgateway), Webcheck, CHD and CHCC. We are a 24x7 team that keep the services running (and aim for 99.5% availability) while we deploy all the new code, improvements and bug fixes that development produce to these live services and much more. We also provide daily, monthly, weekly data used for statistical purposes (trend analysis and corporate insight).
Behaviours
We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:
- Working Together
- Managing a Quality Service
- Making Effective Decisions
Technical skills
We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:
- Monitoring and alerting
- CI build and integration
Benefits
Alongside your salary of £39,591, Companies House contributes £11,469 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.
We believe that our success is driven by the well-being and satisfaction of our team members at all levels of the organisation. At Companies House we’re committed to providing a comprehensive benefits package that goes beyond the ordinary, ensuring your career journey with us is not only fulfilling, but also rewarding. We pride ourselves on offering a quality work-life balance with our employee wellbeing being central to our working practices.
Head to Our benefits - Working for us - Recruitment (companieshouse.gov.uk) to find out more about the fantastic benefits package we have at Companies House.
We celebrate diversity...
As an equal opportunity employer, we celebrate diversity, being committed to ensuring we’re representative of the citizens we serve and creating an inclusive environment. Everyone in Companies House brings something different, and so will you. To fulfil our commitment to recruiting and attracting diverse talent we welcome applications from underrepresented groups. We also welcome applications from Welsh speakers.
We are proud to be a disability confident leader. Our recruitment process is fully inclusive and we can make adjustments as needed through our process. These could include having an interview buddy, extra time at interviews/assessments and receiving interview questions in advance, to name a few. We will be happy to discuss any person-centred adjustments, please contact us by emailing recruitmentCH@companieshouse.gov.uk
Where will you be working?
You will be aligned to our Cardiff Office, where we are currently using a hybrid approach to the way we work. Our approach to hybrid working provides opportunities for you to be adaptable in the way you work so that you can achieve a healthy balance between your work and home life. The degree of choice you have will depend on business need, your role and your day-to-day work activities and will be discussed at offer stage.
Things you need to know
Selection process details
This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours, Experience and Technical skills.
In your application form we’d like you to:
- Tell us about your employment history, including key responsibilities and achievements.
- We’d like you to write a personal statement of 1250 words where you tell us about why you’d be great for this role – we'd like you to particularly include your experience and technical skills that match what we’ve asked for in the person specification. Your personal statement should refer to the bullet points in bold in the person specification (top 3 experience and top 1 technical).
What will the process look like?
- We will sift applications and then invite successful candidates from the sift stage to attend a virtual interview.
- At sift candidates will be assessed against experience listed in the advert and are asked to supply work history and personal statement, referencing any transferable skills using the job description for reference. The personal statement will be scored against the bullet points in bold in the person specification (top 3 experience and top 1 technical).
- At interview candidates will be assessed against the Behaviours and Technical Skills listed in the advert and we will use Success Profiles: Behaviours and Technical skills.
We’re committed to being diverse and inclusive, so please make your application anonymous by removing all identifying personal information (such as names and dates) from your employment history and personal statement.
We understand that you might use AI and other resources for your application; however, please ensure all information you provide is factually accurate, truthful, and original and doesn’t include ideas or work that isn’t your own. This is so that your application is authentically and credibly your own.
Companies House uses a blended interview technique, allowing us to find out more about you. We use the Success Profile framework and may include Strength based questions in the interview.
Our recruitment process is underpinned by the principle of recruitment based on fair and open competition with decisions made on the basis of merit, as outlined in the Civil Service Commissioners’ Recruitment Principles.
Successful candidates must pass a Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS) check before they can be appointed.
BPSS is an entry level security check. It uses the Police National Computer (PNC) to make sure a candidate has no convictions. The check returns evidence of any current criminal record and un-spent convictions under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974.
Successful candidates must meet the security requirements for Security Check (SC) before they can be appointed.
To gain SC clearance you will normally need to have been a UK resident for a minimum of 5 years and will need to successfully complete all stages of the vetting process. More information can be found at National security vetting: clearance levels - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
Nationality statement
Candidates will be subject to UK immigration requirements as well as Civil Service nationality rules. If you're applying for a role requiring security clearance, please be aware that foreign or dual nationality is not an automatic bar. However certain posts may have restrictions which could affect those who do not have sole British nationality or who have personal connections with certain countries outside the UK.
Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.
Security
Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check.
Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is security check (opens in a new window).
See our vetting charter (opens in a new window).
People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.
Nationality requirements
This job is broadly open to the following groups:
- UK nationals
- nationals of the Republic of Ireland
- nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
- nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
- nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
- individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
- Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service
Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)
Working for the Civil Service
The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.
We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window).
The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.
The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.
Diversity and Inclusion
The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan (opens in a new window) and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (opens in a new window).
