Senior DevOps Engineer

Join our innovative tech team as a Senior DevOps Engineer and help shape the experience that our devs have while we deliver services together. We’re looking for an empathetic and experienced engineer to develop and support working systems and services that encapsulate RoS policies and standards and make them rewarding to use. You’ll have the opportunity to work with a talented and collaborative team where you’ll work on interesting projects using modern technologies and have impact beyond your individual contribution. You will have line management responsibility for more junior colleagues and contribute to capability building across the organisation.

The team

Development Enablement is an enablement team focussed on getting good results for about 130 technical doers across a dozen(ish) product delivery teams. Four other enablement teams together support around 1300 staff in RoS.

This role is based on the UK Gov’s DDAT Senior DevOps Engineer: https://ddat-capability-framework.service.gov.uk/role/development-operations-devops-engineer#senior-dev-ops-engineer:

• Design, implement and improve DevOps tooling and engineering workflows that enable secure, efficient and reliable product delivery, meeting the needs of users, delivery teams and service operators.
• Build, maintain and continuously improve deployment pipelines and release processes so services are repeatable, scalable, resilient and highly available.
• Provide technical leadership and hands on support to multidisciplinary delivery teams, helping to resolve complex engineering issues and improve platform performance, reliability and maintainability.
• Coach, mentor and line manage junior colleagues, supporting their development and contributing to capability building across the wider engineering community.
• Work collaboratively with product, engineering and operational colleagues to apply RoS standards, security requirements and good operational practice across the software lifecycle.
• Manage service components to ensure they meet business needs, performance targets and agreed service levels.
• Identify opportunities to improve delivery processes and contribute to implementing practical, sustainable improvements.
• Design and build solutions with appropriate security controls that reduce risk and help protect services, systems and data.
• Apply modern engineering standards, patterns and ways of working consistently, and support others to do the same.
• Design, code, test and document software or infrastructure solutions of medium to high complexity, using agreed standards, tools and engineering practices.
• Use prototyping as a collaborative team activity to test ideas, explore options and iterate towards effective technical solutions.
• Identify, investigate and resolve complex live service issues, and provide expert advice to others on service support approaches and recovery options.
• Work with user researchers and delivery colleagues to understand user needs, represent users in technical discussions and help shape solutions that improve user outcomes.

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours and Experience.

Stage one - Application Process

To apply, click on 'Apply now' and complete the online application form.

You will need to submit:

• A CV outlining your career history and how you meet the Essential criteria (max 4 pages).
• Your responses for the application questions in our application system. 1 will assess your experience and 1 will assess one of the advertised behaviours. (Max 500 words per response)
• You will be invited for complete a technical assessment as part of your application via Hackerrank, this will take place on the 23rd of October and you will have 3 calendar days to complete it.

Please note:

• If we receive a high volume of applications, we may complete an initial sift on Technical Experience.
• We reserve the right to invite candidates to participate in a telephone interview prior to being further assessed.
• Applications that are not accompanied by CVs will not be scored or responses over 500 words will not be considered.
• We would strongly recommend that your statement is written in the STAR format (Situation, Task, Action & Result) and suggest preparing your answers using software such as MS Word or Google Docs, and then uploading the file.
• We strongly advise you review our policy on responsible use of AI in the application process. RoS may contact you for a pre-screening call to verify your responses.
• Applications and appointments are subject to a strict merit-based assessment process, in line with the Civil Service Recruitment Principles.

Stage two – assessment

If successful at application stage, you will be invited to an in-person interview which will include the following:

• Behaviour based interview, we will assess all the advertised behaviours
• Technical case study, we will assess the Essential and Techncial Experience

Behaviour based interview questions will be given to candidates 15 minutes before the start of the interview to allow candidates to prepare in advance.

Guidance on Interview Notes

• You are welcome to bring notes with you to the interview
• Notes can be either handwritten or typed
• Notes should consist of brief prompts, such as key words or bullet points, to help you structure your responses rather than complete answers
• The interview is a conversation, and we are interested in hearing about your experiences in your own words

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.