Senior Infrastructure Engineer - DfE - SEO

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.

Job description

As a Senior Infrastructure Engineer in the Department, you will work within a team of infrastructure specialists and engineers building, operating and maintaining solutions as directed and according to policy. You will:

• Build, operate and maintain Microsoft Azure infrastructure resources to ensure that they are integrated and delivered effectively.
• Respond to incidents and requests to identify and resolve issues preventing delivery.
• Automate the deployment and maintenance of cloud infrastructure resources.
• Advocate user-centric, agile approaches which focus on rapid, effective delivery of high-quality digital services.
• Work with and support third parties in providing infrastructure services.
• Work with technical architects to translate architectural designs into operations.
• Share knowledge of tools and techniques with the wider team and community, growing awareness, inclusivity and balance.
• Provide input into overall management - workforce, budget, technology roadmaps, projects and tasks.
• Oversee and provide management/support to Infrastructure Engineers on the team.

Person specification

Essential criteria:

Assessed in the application and both interview stages:

• Experience of building, configuring, operating and maintaining infrastructure resources in Microsoft Azure environments such as 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 of using automation techniques to configure services, automate processes and extract information. This may include using software, tooling, scripting and other automation techniques such as Azure Automation, PowerShell, Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI), JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), Bicep, Terraform, Python and Ansible.
• Experience defining integration builds to combine IT infrastructure components to create a consolidated solution, and co-ordinating & testing build activities across systems.

Assessed in the application and the second interview stage:

• Experience of collaborating with and conveying technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience of administering security controls, options and configuration settings to protect cloud computing services, and to mitigate against security threats and vulnerabilities.
• Experience of problem management techniques: initiating and monitoring actions to investigate patterns and trends to resolve problems; determining the appropriate remedy; assisting with its implementation; and determining preventative measures.
• Experience of breaking down IT infrastructure problems into component parts to identify and diagnose root causes; troubleshooting; and identifying problems across different technology areas.

Desirable Criteria:

• Microsoft Azure verified credentials, certification or qualifications an advantage.
• Understand the benefits of service levels and service frameworks and how to operate within them to deliver, operate and maintain IT infrastructure services.
• Experience of working with and applying design standards, methods and tools; and developing systems designs for review to ensure the selection of appropriate technology, efficient use of resources and integration of multiple systems and technology.
• Experience of reviewing 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.