Principal Infrastructure Engineer in England

As a Principal Infrastructure Engineer, you will take on a technical leadership role in Contact Engagement Platform (CEP), supporting multiple delivery teams within a complex, multi-supplier environment. You will play a key role within CDIO’s intelligent client function, ensuring that the infrastructure underpinning our services is secure, scalable, resilient, and cost-effective. You will apply your significant technical expertise in areas such as cloud computing, automation, networking, and platform operations to ensure the successful delivery and continuous improvement of HMRC’s technology platforms.

You will continuously assess the suitability of operational practices, governance frameworks, and technical standards to ensure that infrastructure teams are well supported by effective ‘guard rails’, helping them deliver high-quality, maintainable, and value-for-money services for the taxpayer. As an experienced agile practitioner, you will champion modern infrastructure engineering principles, such as continuous delivery, automation, and proactive monitoring. You will advocate for CEP’s Platform and Cloud strategies, particularly in areas where infrastructure and platform services intersect with application development.

You will help strike the right balance between engaging with wider HMRC functions and empowering platform teams to deliver against their priorities, while maintaining strong alignment with organisational goals. You will ensure that CEP’s platforms remain responsive to user and business needs, investing in effective feedback loops and driving continuous improvement. You will identify, mitigate, and resolve risks to infrastructure delivery, ensuring that security, compliance, and reliability remain integral without becoming barriers to progress.

Reporting to the Deputy Director for Contact Engagement Platform (CEP), you will set the strategic direction for your team/s, ensuring that the platforms and services underpinning CEP’s platforms are secure, reliable, scalable, and cost-effective. You will own and define the infrastructure and platform engineering strategy for your service delivery teams within the Contact Engagement Platform. This includes embedding modern agile, DevOps, and cloud engineering practices alongside robust assurance and governance processes, ensuring that infrastructure and platform services meet both user needs and HMRC’s organisational requirements.

You will identify opportunities for HMRC to enhance its approach to infrastructure delivery, through collaboration with other Heads of Infrastructure and Engineering across government, and by maintaining awareness of emerging technologies and industry trends. You will ensure the organisation continues to adopt innovative, efficient, and sustainable technologies that deliver measurable value for money for the taxpayer.

You will champion modern infrastructure engineering practices within CDIO, demonstrating how automation, observability, and self-service can be implemented safely and effectively. You will promote a culture where teams can deploy and manage infrastructure changes frequently and confidently, while maintaining compliance with HMRC’s change management, security, and governance standards.

You will ensure that infrastructure roles within CEP are aligned with the Government Digital and Data Capability Framework, overseeing the development of career pathways, learning opportunities, and apprenticeship programmes that build capability and professional excellence across the community. You will work in close partnership with other Heads of Profession and Practice, for example, those leading Service Validation and Test, Architecture, and Cyber Security, to ensure that the infrastructure engineering strategy is coherent, integrated, and aligned to the wider objectives of Our Future CDIO and HMRC’s long-term digital transformation goals.

Essential criteria:

• Working in a technical leadership role, identifying opportunities for process, tooling, or technology improvements, ensuring these are implemented in line with relevant organisational standards and industry best practices.
• Significant experience of building and operating large-scale services in a cloud-first development environment (preferably AWS).
• Supporting multiple delivery teams within a multi-supplier environment, including defining expected outcomes for teams (such as through statements of work) as well as working with both suppliers and senior stakeholders to remediate issues when they arise.
• Placing user needs first, championing the value of prototyping, user research and performance analytics in understanding how users perceive and interact with services, ensuring that they meet user needs and can be iterated to improve over time, including allowing requirements to change.
• Supporting teams by removing platform blockers, allowing teams to go as fast as they can.
• Promoting and supporting an agile approach to infrastructure engineering delivery within a large-scale, multiple-delivery group environment, emphasising principles such as the value of internal developer platforms and pattern libraries.
• Taking responsibility for operating platform services in a live environment and supporting the process around live incidents, ensuring that appropriate investigations are undertaken, senior stakeholders are kept informed and post-incident analysis is conducted to reduce the risk of reoccurrence.
• Improving internal capability and reducing the reliance upon suppliers for technical roles, for example by identifying or developing appropriate training programmes, or establishing apprenticeship, industrial placement and/or work experience schemes.
• Establishing and enforcing appropriate “guard rails” around how teams deploy services in a cloud environment, in the form of processes or tooling, to ensure adherence to expected organisational standards and policies.
• A strong understanding of potential security controls for internal and external facing web services and their supporting platform capabilities, with experience of both agreeing appropriate controls with security teams and ensuring they are correctly implemented in services.
• Providing advice and guidance to senior stakeholders around the implications of technical decisions and ways of working, based upon your prior experience and in-depth understanding of the relevant technical concepts.
• Contributing to the wider technical/profession communities within a large organisation, sharing your experience and expertise with other areas to improve organisational capability.