Senior Technologist

About the Role

A senior technologist provides strong analytical skills, technical delivery capability and practical engineering judgement, working with the Lead Technologist to implement architectures that are secure, sustainable and aligned to organisational goals. This role balances hands‑on build work with design review, technical documentation, operational support and continuous improvement among scientific and business projects alike.

Key responsibilities

• Deliver high‑quality technology changes and IT solutions across one or more scientific services, platforms and scientific project environments, working in multidisciplinary teams
• Design, build and improve solutions using modern engineering practices (version control, automated testing, CI/CD, infrastructure/configuration as code where appropriate)
• Contribute to code reviews, technical discovery, technical spikes and proof‑of‑concepts, helping teams make pragmatic trade‑offs between speed, cost, risk and quality
• Support and improve live services, including participating in incident response and problem management, improving observability, resilience and runbooks
• Produce and maintain clear technical designs, diagrams, and documentation that can be understood, supported, and maintained by others aligned with the Lead Technologist’s direction and NPL’s architecture standards to enable handover and knowledge sharing
• Apply secure by design principles to ensure solutions are supportable, interoperable and compliant with relevant policies and controls
• Identify technical debt, single points of failure and opportunities for incremental improvements, contributing to prioritisation with product/delivery colleagues
• Research and evaluate cutting‑edge IT hardware and software to support our back catalog of solution options for enabling our scientists and engineers
• Support technical assurance activities by preparing evidence, options and recommendations for design/architecture review
• Contribute to the Technical Delivery Authority (TDA) process by aligning work with agreed standards and responding to actions and recommendations
• Proactively identify and manage technology risks (security, resilience, supplier lock‑in and sustainability) and escalation where appropriate
• Work closely with product, delivery, operations, scientific, and business stakeholders to understand outcomes and constraints, and communicate technical choices clearly
• Support suppliers and partners by providing clear technical requirements, reviewing deliverables and helping ensure effective knowledge transfer to NPL
• Develop, mentor, and share knowledge with more junior members of the team
• Responsible for taking reasonable duty of care for Health & Safety of themselves and of other persons who may be affected by their acts or omissions at work and always follow direct instructions given with regards to Health & Safety.

About You

Are you passionate about IT, science, technology and engineering?

Do you enjoy building and learning about systems, even outside of work (like homelabbing)?

Got a background in an IT related field (including software)?

Do you have a curious mind?

Do you want to build and maintain IT Lego and get paid to do it?

This may be the role for you!

NPL is looking to build a team to support our scientific projects with their IT system needs. On a daily basis, you’ll be working as part of a team of similar minded and capable IT professionals to apply your existing software, hardware, networking and security skills to design, build and maintain IT solutions to meet user needs in