Lead Infrastructure Engineer in Edinburgh

Are you ready to lead cloud transformation at scale in a team as passionate about public service and technical excellence as you are? Join us as a Lead Cloud Engineer and drive innovation, resilience and operational excellence across our AWS estate. As Lead Cloud Engineer within the Agriculture and Rural Economy (ARE) Digital and Data Division, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the cloud engineering capability that underpins critical digital services across the Scottish Government. Our mission is to provide the technical expertise and capacity needed to deliver secure, reliable and future‑ready digital solutions that support sustainable economic growth in agriculture, the food industry and rural communities.

You will lead the development and implementation of cloud strategy, architecture and engineering standards across our AWS estate, working closely with Product, Platform, Software Engineering, Data, Site Reliability Engineering and Cyber Security teams. Your primary objective will be to ensure our cloud platforms are robust, scalable and secure, enabling the successful delivery of key digital outcomes while driving continuous improvement, innovation and best practice across the organisation.

Responsibilities

• Coding and implementing scalable, secure and supported cloud infrastructure.
• Presenting recommendations for technologies or system improvements to support project goals, based on IT knowledge and analysis of business and system needs.
• Evaluating the success of integrated solutions, identifying best practices and lessons learned.
• Ensuring high availability and performance of critical services.
• Building internal cloud capability and mentoring engineers.
• Supporting innovation and continuous improvement in service delivery.
• Contributing to the department’s overall technical strategy and roadmap, while owning the technical roadmap for services within your defined domain.

Success Profile

We use an assessment framework called "Success Profiles" which lists the elements we test and provides detailed descriptions of each.

Experience

• Lead Criteria 1 – Lead: Your experience enables you to drive strategic improvements across cloud platforms and infrastructure operations, enhancing performance, reliability and scalability of engineering systems while fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement.
• Lead Criteria 2 – Design: Your experience engineering cloud‑based systems using a range of technologies and the AWS Well‑Architected Framework enables you to design robust, scalable and secure solutions, embedding security controls by design and ensuring alignment with performance, compliance, cost and operational requirements.
• Write: Your experience building solutions to highly complex problems using modern cloud technologies allows you to use agreed specifications to independently design, code, test and document infrastructure modules of high complexity, using the right standards and tools.
• Run: Your experience developing and deploying live cloud infrastructure enables you to define the monitoring, alerting and operational procedures of a service to consistently identify, locate and fix faults.

Behaviours

• Making a Quality Service – Level 4
• Making Effective Decisions – Level 4

Technical Skills

This role is aligned to the Lead Infrastructure Engineer role within the IT Operations Design Job Family. These skills will be tested during the Technical Assessment if you are successful at sift stage.

Working Pattern

Our standard hours are 35 hours per week and we offer a range of flexible working options depending on the needs of the role, including Flexi‑leave. Staff in hybrid‑compatible roles should aim to work in‑person 40 % of the time, either in an office or other agreed work location.

Security Checks

Successful candidates must complete the Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS) before they can be appointed. BPSS is comprised of four main pre‑employment checks: Identity, Right to work, Employment History and a Criminal Record check (unspent convictions).

Equality Statement

We are committed to equality and inclusion and we aim to recruit a diverse workforce that reflects the population of our nation.