Senior DevOps Engineer (WebOps & Cloud Application Support) - Companies House - HEO

This is an exciting opportunity in the Digital and Technology directorate for an enthusiastic Senior engineer with great leadership and technical skills who can support and develop Companies House systems.

You will be customer and service focused with particular attention on service availability, problems solving and root cause analysis.   

We promote a “Team” first approach with everyone pulling together to achieve best results. You will join a busy, large, diverse team of engineers with a broad range of skills and domain knowledge. 

The team support and develop a number of Companies House external and internal customer facing services, and associated backend processing systems. These allow customers to search and update the company register.   

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

We are proud to have hit our availability target of 99.5% over the last 5 years and you will be working in a team that will assist us to continue to meet this target across our new and current systems.

The team carry out maintenance, upgrades, automation and service improvements in order to provide a high capacity, secure and resilient IT Service capable of exceeding performance targets.  

The estate has been mostly migrated to the AWS cloud and we are in the middle of a huge Transformation project to align our services with our new powers under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill.

We are looking for experienced Support engineers with experience in modern DevOps technologies, or a passion for automation and monitoring and a willingness to learn.

We work in an agile way, so you will develop your skills and experience by working on large and small projects alongside software engineering, analysis and product colleagues.  

You will be part of the IT Services Digital team at a time of great change and play an integral part in the way that Companies House systems are developed in the future.  

You, and the team, will be responsible for maintenance, upgrades, automation, and service improvements, resolving ServiceNow Incident issues and finding root causes of problems.

You will contribute to the development of projects to improve the range and quality of digital services available to the customer and take an active part in the transformation of our services.   

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.   

Come and help us as drive our digital services and culture. 

Person specification

We're looking for the following experience, which will be assessed at sift and at interview:

Experience (Please refer to these in your personal statement)

• Incident/Problem resolution and root cause analysis.  
• Problem resolution via coding and scripting.  
• Ad hoc reporting and data management.
• System software build and release - Automation of manual processes, including code deployment and environment provisioning.
• Performance monitoring / alerting / tuning.
• Potential development of problem fixes or minor change requests.
• Coach and support colleagues in non-functional requirements, ensuring availability, security, capacity, and performance for the services.
• Engage in continuous improvement activities by working collaboratively within and outside of the team.
• Mentoring and leading less experienced members of the team.
• ITIL 4 Foundation (training can be provided).

Technical Experience  (Please refer to these in your personal statement)

This role requires experience in Unix/Linux, particularly shell scripting, database querying and log investigation.

The team looks after lots of different systems in many different technologies; some require extensive domain knowledge, some extensive technical skills.

We do not expect anyone to have everything, but we are looking for experienced support engineers who show:  

• Demonstrable experience of Unix/Linux.  
• Demonstrable experience of automation and monitoring in a support environment. 
• Demonstrable experience of supporting infrastructure in the cloud.
• Demonstrable experience of database querying.   
• Demonstrable experience of any type of coding.  
• Knowledge of DevOps and associated technologies – Continuous Delivery methods and techniques, including Agile. 

Some examples of technologies used to manage front and back-end services: 

DevOps/Cloud – e.g. AWS, Git, Terraform, Docker. 

Databases – e.g. Oracle, Mongo. 

Monitoring – e.g. ELK stack, Grafana. 

Application Servers – e.g. WebLogic, Apache. 

Programming languages – e.g. shell, java, python. 

Experience in similar technologies will be considered. The roles offered are varied and interesting requiring plenty of learning and development. 

Behaviours

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

• Working Together
• Managing a Quality Service
• Changing and Improving
• Delivering at Pace

Technical skills

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

• Demonstrable experience of Unix/Linux
• Demonstrable experience of database querying