Senior Data Platform Engineer - UKSA - SEO

The UKHSA Digital and Data Directorate provides strategic leadership and oversight for developing and managing a common and bespoke suite of performant, modern, secure, data and analytical tools, services, platforms and applications, ensuring access to high quality data and analytics services, internally and externally.

You will work in the Data Engineering and Enablement Division that reports into the Digital and Data Directorate. It’s an exciting time to join as we seek to create leading Health Protection data capabilities that enable data scientists and data analysts to develop insights that inform public health decisions with resilience platforms and curated data assets.

The core activities of Engineering and Enablement include the ingestion of data sources, building data pipelines, curated data views and data capabilities fused from data, models and software that enable the exploitation of data by analysts, data scientists and MI teams.

Job description

We are seeking to mature our advanced platform capabilities with standardised practices, machine learning and agility needed to pro-active detect and respond to new public health issues. We are looking for a Senior Data Platform Engineer to work as part of the Engineering and Enablement team to support the operation and the development of our Enterprise Data and Analytics platform, specifically: 

• Work on the design and maintenance of scalable and reliable infrastructure, ensuring
  optimal performance and continuous optimisation.
• Develop and maintain tools and scripts for automating deployment and monitoring, whilst managing systems to maintain environment consistency.
• Enhance CI/CD pipelines for automated software delivery, ensuring rapid and reliable code integration and deployment.
• Apply security best practices, including access control and threat detection, and ensure compliance with industry standards.
  Address performance bottlenecks in the infrastructure, conducting load testing and capacity planning for increased workloads.
• Improve monitoring and alerting systems for proactive issue detection and quickly
  troubleshoot infrastructure-related incidents.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams and effectively communicate technical concepts and solutions to non-technical stakeholders.
• Contribute and review our comprehensive documentation for infrastructure and processes.

Person specification

Your key responsibilities will include:

• Working on the design and implementation of robust, scalable, and highly available infrastructure solutions, while continuously monitoring, maintaining, and optimising existing infrastructure for performance and reliability.
• Develop and maintain automation scripts and tools to streamline deployment, configuration, and monitoring processes, and implement configuration management systems for environment consistency.
• Enhance CI/CD pipelines to automate software delivery, testing, and deployment, managing code integration for rapid and reliable releases.
• Apply security best practices including access control, vulnerability scanning, and threat detection, and ensure infrastructure compliance with industry standards and regulations.
• Address performance bottlenecks and optimisation opportunities within the infrastructure stack, and conduct load testing and capacity planning for anticipated increased workloads.
• Improve monitoring and alerting systems for proactive issue detection and resolution and troubleshoot and resolve infrastructure-related incidents promptly.
• Contribute to our comprehensive documentation for infrastructure, processes, and procedures, ensuring it remains up-to-date and accessible to team members.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams such as developers and system administrators, and effectively communicate technical concepts and solutions to non-technical stakeholders.
• Contribute to the decision-making throughout the product life cycle and phases of product delivery, from stakeholder engagement to analysis, development of platform designs, and implementation.
• Act as a DevOps champion and promote DevOps and Agile best practices with passion.
• Be a team player, support team members for success, recognising the bigger picture, and going the extra mile for high quality delivery in a high-performing organisation.
• Understand the needs of technical and business stakeholders into technical requirements, manage stakeholder expectations, and contribute to challenging discussions.
• Apply knowledge of techniques and concepts required for the role, liaise with other technical teams for seamless service delivery, and identify areas for impactful innovation in data tools and techniques.  

The duties/responsibilities listed above describe the post as it is at present and is not intended to be exhaustive. The Job holder is expected to accept reasonable alterations and additional tasks of a similar level that may be necessary.