Senior DevOps Engineer - Insolvency Service - SEO

Location: Birmingham, Cardiff, Croydon, Edinburgh, Exeter, Ipswich, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Nottingham, Stratford.

We have an exciting opportunity for a talented, enthusiastic Senior DevOps Engineer within our Digital Services team. We are responsible for developing, maintaining and supporting the agency’s line of business applications. The Insolvency Service is a leading Government agency which plays a crucial role in providing essential services to the public and to business. The work we do is important to the proper functioning of markets, the economy in general and support for thousands of people each year who are in financial difficulty.

Inclusive and diverse teams are important to us. We welcome and encourage applications from everyone, including groups underrepresented in our workforce. The Insolvency Service strives to ensure that the agency is a safe, inclusive, and welcoming place for everybody to bring their true self to work and to help the agency to achieve its diversity objectives. We have 9 active employee network groups available to join or become an ally, these include: Carers Network, Disability network group, Employee Assistance, Representatives, FACES Network Group, LGBT+, Mind Matters, Part Time Workers, The Shed - Men’s Network Group and Women’s Network Group.

Digital Services is an in‑house team, which has recently moved from using a 3rd party DevOps function to bringing it in‑house. We are also consolidating our technology stack and moving away from legacy services. This is a fantastic opportunity to help shape our digital services and the way we work for a sustainable, user‑centric future.

Digital services is part of Change and Technology Services (CTS) who support and improve applications and systems across the agencies IT landscape. CTS provide key services including digital services, cyber security and information governance, service architecture and governance and digital programme delivery. DevOps look after the deployment and infrastructure of the applications and products we deliver. They keep the lights on and are first to identify and resolve any issues with the live services. They work closely with developers and QAT to ensure the products meet the demands of the users, whilst also ensuring it meets cyber‑security demands.

As a senior DevOps engineer you will deliver and integrate software to form a complete DevOps toolchain. They are responsible for planning and designing large groups of stories. At this role level you will:

• Transform technical requirements into an effective DevOps toolchain to enable product delivery.
• Provide coaching and mentoring to more junior colleagues.
• Ensure that deployment strategies for products are repeatable, scalable and highly available.
• Have deep technical knowledge, providing support to delivery teams and solving complex problems.

Responsibilities:

• Keeping the applications running in production and non‑production environments.
• Ensuring that applications are deployed in a timely and secure manner.
• Defining standards for the successful operation of a DevOps function within the Insolvency Service.
• Monitoring and resolving issues in Production environments.
• Contributing to priority incident bridge calls and root cause analysis.
• Providing estimates to upcoming DevOps activities that are related to the delivery roadmap.
• Providing updates and comments to in‑progress work.
• Working with and providing support to development and operations teams.
• Escalating tickets to the Scrum Master/Delivery Manager that are unable to be completed and are now blocked.
• Updating and building deployment pipelines in line with the build and deployment model.
• Raising changes to go through and attending CAB to represent those changes.
• Contributing to the overall improvement of the application technology stack.
• Ensuring that documentation conforms to application documentation standards and is up‑to‑date and reflective of any changes.

The ideal candidate will:

• Have an inquisitive mind and be able to adapt to other problems in hand.
• Be able to keep your own efforts focused on Digital Services goals to help the delivery of our roadmap and value to the business.
• Have a keen eye for detail and a tenacious approach to work.
• Need to be able to ask difficult and unpopular questions and work with the Lead DevOps engineer to arrive at decisions that are evidence based and for the benefit of Digital Services and the wider Insolvency Service.
• Have strong analytical and problem‑solving skills to be able to identify patterns, draw conclusions and resolve repeatable incidents.
• Have the ability to build and establish key relationships within Digital Services to support the delivery of business outcomes, in a secure, stable manner.
• Possess good interpersonal and communication skills both written and verbal.

If you do not currently hold Security Check (SC) clearance, we will support you through the vetting process following a conditional offer of employment. As SC clearance is essential for this role, appointment is dependent on successfully obtaining and maintaining it. We will provide guidance and support throughout the process.

Behaviours: We will assess you against these behaviours during the selection process: Managing a Quality Service, Changing and Improving.

Technical skills: We will assess you against these technical skills during the selection process: During the interview the candidate will be given a hypothetical technical scenario that will assess their technical knowledge and approach. The candidates will not be required to create a presentation beforehand.