Senior DevOps Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) - HO - G7
Government Digital & Data -
The Reliability Enablement team within Data Services & Analytics (DSA) helps teams improve their product and service reliability by providing observability and embedding Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles. You will be a key part of the team, leading on engagements with product teams and supporting more junior members of the team.
Job description
The Senior DevOps (SRE) is responsible for improving the reliability of our platforms and services. Your role is not only to work with existing platforms and services, but also contribute to the reliable design and build of new ones, working with our architects and standards. You will also consider the security of platforms and services, monitoring as necessary.
You will support long or short-term discovery within teams and with developers, helping them understand design constraints, and workforce/cost implications. You will advise on CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Delivery) pipelines, ensuring those new users are able to deploy with appropriate speed. You will help teams use observability tooling effectively to ensure highly available systems. As necessary you may be working with a team long term to ensure effective working and maintain overall workflows.
The Senior DevOps (SRE) will be expected to mentor and lead other engineers in technical tasks, as well as support recruitment and assessment activities.
Tools and Technologies we use:
We are keen for Engineers to continue learning new technologies, we have a large range in the Home Office including:
- Backend: Java, Node.js, C#, Python, PHP, Scala, Power Platform
- Frontend: React, JavaScript, Typescript, Angular
- Data: PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, Apache Kafka, Neo4J, Amazon Athena
- DevOps: AWS, Kubernetes, Azure, GitHub, Docker, Ansible, Terraform, Dynatrace
What you will do
Your main day to day responsibilities will be:
- supporting teams to effectively build, improve and deploy reliable and secure services
- leading the build of new or improved shared tooling to help teams automate and maximise reliability
- spotting instances where teams are not using best practice and advising on how to improve
- supporting engineers in service topology discovery; helping to define QA and deployment pipelines
- helping teams improve their integration approaches; increasing reliability and the value delivered to users
Like many organisations we need to maintain our services 24/7, therefore, on occasions there may be a requirement to work out of hours, for which you will be paid an additional allowance.
Person specification
UK residency and security requirements - You need to have lived in the UK for the past 5 years.
Essential Criteria
As a Senior DevOps, you will have experience of:
- Advising teams on the reliable design and implementation of complex cloud solutions using AWS or Azure according to best practices (SWDN - Software Design)
- Leading the implementation of automated testing, scanning and code analysis tooling, and advising on best practices (TEST - Testing)
- Specifying and ensuring good use of processes, procedures and tooling for application monitoring, maintenance, and incident response (ASUP - Application Support)
- Devising and leading implementation of data management processes and standards for cloud resources such as naming, tagging, metadata, backups, and documentation (DATM - Data Management)
- Designing, coding, testing, maintaining and documenting scripts and infrastructure-as-code definitions to automate build and deployment activities. (PROG - Programming/Software Development)
- Specifying, implementing, and promoting use of CI/CD pipelines according to best practices (SINT - Systems Integration and Build)
SFIA capability framework
Skills for the Information Age (SFIA) is the technical framework that sets the standard capability and development of all engineering levels in the Home Office. This is a link to the capability framework: All skills A–Z — English (sfia-online.org)
We use set SFIA technical skills to form our interview questions and we will assess you against these technical skills during the selection process.
SFIA levels of responsibility – Use the SFIA Levels of responsibility to understand what would be expected for each Technical Skill listed below.
SFIA Technical Skills
The essential technical skills listed above are reflective of the Home Office Government Digital and Data Profession Career Framework. Please see below for the relevant skills required for your role.
Behaviours
We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:
- Leadership
Technical skills
We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:
- Software design (SWDN) - Level 4
- Programming/software development (PROG) - Level 3
- Testing (TEST) - Level 3
- Systems integration and build (SINT) - Level 4
- Data management (DATM) - Level 4
- Application support (ASUP) - Level 4
