Senior Site Reliability Engineer - MoJ - G7

This is a great opportunity for an experienced Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), or an experienced DevOps Engineer looking to move into SRE space, to work as part of the HMPPS Digital Support Team, responsible for growing the operational maturity, quality and performance of our portfolio of Digital Services alongside our growing Prison and Probation digital product teams. The role is pivotal in continuing to provide a high quality service to our colleagues across HMPPS, and forms a key part of Prison and Probation digital delivery practice.

Prison and Probation digital services exist to create the tools that support HMPPS so that they can provide decent, safe and productive places to live and work, and support prisons and Probation to protect the public and reduce reoffending by rehabilitating the people in our care through education and employment. Our Live Services mission is to ensure that the HMPPS Digital’s underpinning technology and services operate for those accessing our digital services throughout the HMPPS estate.

This role aligns against the Senior DevOps engineer from the Government Digital and Data Framework.

To help picture your life at MoJ Justice Digital please take a look at our blog and our Digital and Technology strategy 2025

Key Responsibilities:

The Site Reliability Engineering team is responsible for the overall development of reliability engineering in Digital Prisons Services.

This will include being able to:

●    help to identify and promote best practice in reliability engineering

●    design, build and test systems and processes to support software development and deployment

●    work in a multidisciplinary manner across the programme by working with developers, technical architects, product managers and others, to provide robust, resilient and scalable platforms

●    help to ensure the programme has the right processes in place, including identifying and measuring important metrics to drive continual improvement

●    work with colleagues on identification of technical risks in relation to the infrastructure, as well as plans to resolve or mitigate the risks

●    communicate concerns, risks and issues with the broader team and senior management

●    prioritise and deliver recommendations and improvements in response to incident reviews

●    set an example for and encourage open, positive, and constructive communication both within the team and when communicating with other digital teams

●    cultivate and maintain relationships with other teams within Justice Digital, the MoJ's Department responsible for Digital Services.

●    collaborate effectively with other site reliability engineers and developers

●    work with teams, Cyber Security and Information Assurance to ensure the ongoing integrity and security of our service and infrastructure

●    provide coaching and mentoring to more junior colleagues and line manage a small group of less experienced SRE engineers

●    help with hiring, taking part in recruitment of other SRE engineers and technical staff

If this feels like an exciting challenge, something you are enthusiastic about, and want to join our team please read on and apply!

Benefits

●      37 hours per week and flexible working options including working from home, working part-time, job sharing, or working compressed hours.

●      A £1k per person learning budget is in place to support all our people, with access to best in class conferences and seminars, accreditation with professional bodies, fully funded vocational programmes and e-learning platforms

●      Staff have 10% time to dedicate to develop & grow

●      Generous civil service pension based on defined benefit scheme, with employer contributions of 28.97% from April 1st 2024 (Contribution Rates)

●      25 days leave (plus bank holidays) and 1 privilege day usually taken around the Kings’ birthday. 5 additional days of leave once you have reached 5 years of service.

●      Compassionate maternity, adoption, and shared parental leave policies, with up to 26 weeks leave at full pay, 13 weeks with partial pay, and 13 weeks further leave. And maternity support/paternity leave at full pay for 2 weeks, too!

●     Wellbeing support including access to the Calm app.

●      Bike loans up to £2500 and secure bike parking (subject to availability and location)

●      Season ticket loans, childcare vouchers and eye-care vouchers.

●      5 days volunteering paid leave.

●      Free membership to BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT.

●      Some offices may have a subsidised onsite Gym.

Person Specification

We’re interested in people who:

●    have experience of working with technologies that underpin digital services such as databases, web servers, DNS, CDNs, reverse proxies, message queues and load balancers

●    have an understanding of version control (ideally with Git)

●    are familiar with container orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes, ECS or Cloud Foundry; or serverless application design such as AWS Lambda

●    have worked with public cloud providers such as Azure, AWS or Google Cloud in a production system

●    have an understanding of SRE principles such as capacity planning, SLOs and SLIs and how to design and support resilient, large scale, high performance services in a production environment

●    can deploy monitoring tools to ensure systems are appropriately monitored and instrumented to enable teams to identify and respond to operational issues quickly and effectively

●    are familiar with at least one programming language (we mainly use Node.js, Java and Kotlin)

●    have a strong preference for automation and experience of using Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform

●    enjoy learning and helping others

Willingness to be assessed against the requirements for SC clearance.

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 and the Civil Service D&I Strategy.

How to Apply 

Candidates must submit a CV and a mandatory Statement of Suitability of no more than 500 words which describes how you meet the requirements set out in the Person Specification above.

Failure to provide both documents will result in a rejection of your application.

In Justice Digital, we recruit using a combination of the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability and Success Profiles Frameworks. We will assess your Experience, Technical Skills and the following Behaviours during the assessment process:

●      Working together

●      Managing a quality service

●      Developing self and others

 A diverse panel will review your application against the Person Specification above.

Successful candidates who meet the required standard will then be invited to a 90-minute panel interview held via video conference. A brief technical exercise will need to be completed in advance, as it will be presented and discussed during the interview.

Should we receive a high volume of applications, a pre-sift based on experience of working with technologies that underpin digital services will be conducted prior to the sift.

Should you be unsuccessful in the role that you have applied for but demonstrate the capability for a role at a lower level, we reserve the right to discuss this opportunity with you and offer you the position without needing a further application.

A reserve list may be held for up to 12 months, from which further appointments may be made.

Terms & Conditions

Please review our Terms & Conditions which set out how we recruit and provide further information related to theJustice Digital Recruitment Terms & Conditions role and salary arrangements.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact recruitment@digital.justice.gov.uk

Person specification

Please refer to attached job description