Senior Site Reliability Engineer in Belfast

Location: Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, London, Salford

About the job

Job summary: If you would like to find out more about the role, the Site Reliability Engineering team and what it’s like to work at DBT, we are holding a Hiring Manager Q&A session for this role where you can virtually 'meet the team' on Monday 17th February at 12:30pm.

About us: The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) has a clear mission - to grow the economy. Our role is to help businesses invest, grow and export to create jobs and opportunities right across the country. We do this in three ways:

• We help to build a strong, competitive business environment, where consumers are protected and companies rewarded for treating their employees properly.
• We open international markets and ensure resilient supply chains through Free Trade Agreements, trade facilitation and multilateral agreements.
• We work in partnership with businesses every day, providing advice, finance and deal-making support to those looking to start up, invest, export and grow.

The Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) directorate develops and operates tools and services to support us in this mission.

About the role: We are on a mission to build a new cutting-edge developer platform in AWS and migrate existing DBT services from GOV.UK PaaS in the process. Can we rely on you to make us more reliable? We need Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) to ensure our internet services work as users expect.

Main responsibilities: As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer you will work to give development teams the tools for their job, including application performance monitoring, exception, log and metrics aggregation, dashboards, and declarative CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) pipelines. You’ll evangelise product teams about service-level indicators, objectives, and error budgets, and negotiate them. You’ll help build and scale our global product platform and participate in an on-call rota for which you will receive an additional allowance.

Specific projects the team are working on include rolling out an observability tool to enhance system monitoring and incident response and streamlining deployment processes to reduce downtime and speed up feature delivery.

You will be using:

• Amazon Web Services
• Azure
• AWS CodePipelines and AWS CodeBuild
• Terraform & AWS Copilot (CloudFormation)
• Docker, Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
• ElasticSearch/OpenSearch
• Python and Django framework
• PostgreSQL as a service (Amazon RDS)
• Sentry
• Redis/Elasticache

Person specification

Skills and experience:

It is essential that you have:

• Cloud experience with either Amazon Web Services, Azure or Google Cloud.
• Ability to build code-defined, reliable, and well tested infrastructure on top of cloud computing systems (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi).
• Experience and fluency in one or more programming languages, writing clean and effective code.
• Experience in designing, analysing, and troubleshooting distributed systems.
• Knowledge of Linux/Unix fundamentals and TCP/IP networking.
• Ability to see user impact in the infrastructure changes.
• Excellent communication skills when dealing with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

It is desirable that you have:

• Experience in defining and measuring Service Level Objectives through observability.
• Experience in prototyping through reuse of existing Open-Source components.

Benefits:

• Learning and development tailored to your role
• An environment with flexible working options
• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity
• A Civil Service pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%

Things you need to know:

Selection process details: As part of the application process you will be asked to upload a 2-page CV which outlines your experience, skills and fit for the role, and to complete a short, pre-recorded video screening interview (alternately you can provide written answers to questions). Inspire People will assess your application against the essential criteria listed above to compile a longlist of applications, which will then be sifted by DBT hiring managers. If you are successful, you will be invited to interview.

Sift will be from week commencing 3rd March. Interviews will be from week commencing 10th March. Please note these dates are indicative and may be subject to change.

How we interview: At the interview stage for this role, you will be asked to demonstrate relevant Technical Skills and Behaviours from the Success Profiles framework. A role-specific list of these can be found below. The technical element within the interview will assess against capabilities outlined under DevOps engineer within the DDaT framework. As part of this process, you will be asked to complete a technical problem-solving exercise during your interview.

Technical Skills:

• Availability and capacity management
• Development process optimisations
• Information security
• Modern standards approach
• Programming and build (software engineering)
• Prototyping (with MVP and POC)
• Systems integration
• User focus

Behaviours:

• Communicating and Influencing
• Developing Self and Others

How we offer: Offers will be made in merit order based on location preferences. If you pass the bar at interview but are not the highest scoring you will be held on a 12-month reserve list in case a role becomes available. If you are judged a near miss at interview, you may be offered a post at the grade below the one you applied for.

This role requires SC clearance. DBT’s requirement for SC clearance is to have been present in the UK for at least 3 of the last 5 years. Failure to meet this requirement will result in your application being rejected and your offer will be withdrawn.

Checks will also be made against departmental or company records (personnel files, staff reports, sick leave reports and security records), UK criminal records covering both spent and unspent criminal records, your credit and financial history with a credit reference agency, and security services record.

More about us: This role can only be worked from within the UK, not overseas. If you are based in London, you will receive London weighting. DBT employees work in a hybrid pattern, spending 2-3 days a week (pro rata) in the office on average. Travel to your primary office location will not be paid for by DBT, but costs for travel to an office which is not your main location will be covered.

You can find out more about our office locations, how we calculate salaries, our diversity statement and reasonable adjustments, the Recruitment Principles, the Civil Service code and our complaints procedure on our website.

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Security: Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check. Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is security check.

Nationality requirements: This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• Nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• Nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• Nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• Individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements can be found on our website.

Working for the Civil Service: The Civil Service Code sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants. We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles. The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities.

Diversity and Inclusion: The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found.

Apply and further information: This vacancy is part of the Great Place to Work for Veterans initiative. The Civil Service welcomes applications from people who have recently left prison or have an unspent conviction.

Contact point for applicants: Job contact: Name: DDaT Recruitment Email: ddat.recruitment@businessandtrade.gov.uk