Senior DevOps Engineer - UK Health Security Agency - SEO

Location: Birmingham, Chilton, Leeds, Liverpool, London (Canary Wharf or Colindale), Porton (Core HQ and Scientific Campus)

About the job

The UKHSA Development and Operations team leads the digital transformation of UKHSA to make it a more data driven, customer focused, digital organisation. We do this by delivering services which meet and maintain the Government Digital Service (GDS) Digital by Default Service Standard. DevOps Engineers at UKHSA work collaboratively with developers and stakeholders such as Data Scientists and Public Health officials to deliver software which helps to drive forward the mission of the agency. We employ modern best practices to deliver projects quickly, safely, and cost-effectively.

This role attracts a Market Pay Supplement (MPS) of up to £5000 per annum, pro rata, to 31st March 2027. A capability assessment will be required to determine the amount given.

Working for your organisation

We pride ourselves as being an employer of choice, where Everyone Matters promoting equality of opportunity to actively encourage applications from everyone, including groups currently underrepresented in our workforce. UKHSA ethos is to be an inclusive organisation for all our staff and stakeholders. To create, nurture and sustain an inclusive culture, where differences drive innovative solutions to meet the needs of our workforce and wider communities. We do this through celebrating and protecting differences by removing barriers and promoting equity and equality of opportunity for all.

DevOps Engineers at UKHSA are responsible for:

• Designing, implementing, and supporting automated continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines across a wide range of digital applications and services.
• Working collaboratively with developers, platform engineers, and stakeholders to deliver secure, scalable, and reliable cloud-based solutions using DevOps and agile best practices.
• Developing Infrastructure as Code using tools such as Terraform and Ansible, automating cloud platform deployments, and supporting containerised application delivery.
• Troubleshooting and resolving issues within deployment pipelines, performing root cause analysis, and working closely with development teams to improve application reliability and operational efficiency.
• Reviewing and advising on the migration of applications to cloud environments, supporting automation initiatives, and helping teams adopt modern DevOps methodologies aligned to GDS Digital Service Standards.
• Working within multidisciplinary scrum teams, collaborating with Delivery Managers, Product Owners, and technical colleagues to translate business requirements into technical solutions and user stories.
• Continuously developing their technical knowledge, promoting DevOps best practices across teams, and contributing to delivering projects effectively within agreed timescales and budgets.

This list is not exhaustive.

As a DevOps Engineer, you will have experience of designing and architecting highly-available services on a cloud platform such as AWS, and of implementing continuous integration technologies such as Jenkins, and orchestration tools such as Ansible or Terraform. You will work to optimise our development processes and identify process optimisation opportunities and contribute to the implementation of proposed solutions. You will initially work mostly with AWS and Azure, developing and supporting systems and infrastructure through to production using modern continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD) techniques and supporting analysis, identification, prioritisation and implementation of incremental improvements to our services currently running.

You will be a good technical communicator, able to improve developer experience through tools and technologies in collaboration with the development teams throughout the development lifecycle to live service and decommissioning. You will maintain the security, confidentiality and integrity of our cloud services by implementing relevant information security standards and ensure compliance with relevant legislations and regulations.

Person specification

Essential Criteria:

• Educated to degree level in relevant subject such as computer science with core development element or equivalent level qualification or experience of working at a similar level in a DevOps specialist area.
• Proficiency/experience with DevOps approaches to application testing and deployment.
• Experience of automated deployment of applications and services to AWS or Azure.
• Design, development and support of CI/CD pipelines in a microservice architecture.
• Experience of implementing a continuous integration platform (such as Gitlab CI, Github Actions or Jenkins) using repeatable deployment patterns.
• Knowledge/experience of appropriate standards, methods and tools to design systems using DevOps principles.
• Knowledge/experience of cloud automation technologies such as Terraform.
• Genuine passion and interest in DevOps and cloud automation technologies and version control software (Git).
• Ability to handle multiple tasks and workloads.
• Able to identify opportunities to optimise application development/deployment and lifecycle processes and contribute to their implementation using DevOps and Agile approaches.
• Able to define the continuous integration build, co-ordinate build activities across systems and understand how to undertake and support integration testing activities.
• Able to work with business and technology stakeholders to translate business problems into technical designs, specifying and designing systems using appropriate standards and tools.
• An understanding of and commitment to equality of opportunity and good working relationships, both in terms of day-to-day working practices, but also in relation to management systems.

Desirable Criteria:

• Experience of containerisation or microservices technologies.
• Good understanding of RESTful Web Services.
• Good understanding of user needs and the difference between user needs and desires.
• Experience of Agile principles, practices and tools such as Jira.