JOB SUMMARY

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is the digital centre of government — we are responsible for setting, leading and delivering the vision for a modern digital government.

Our priorities are to drive a modern digital government, by:

• joining up public sector services
• harnessing the power of AI for the public good
• strengthening and extending our digital and data public infrastructure
• elevating leadership and investing in talent
• funding for outcomes and procuring for growth and innovation
• committing to transparency and driving accountability

We are home to the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (I.AI), the world-leading GOV.UK and at the forefront of coordinating the UK’s geospatial strategy and activity. We lead the Government Digital and Data function and champion the work of digital teams across government.
We’re part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and employ more than 1,000 people all over the UK, with hubs in Manchester, London and Bristol.
The Government Digital Service is where talent translates into impact. From your first day, you’ll be working with some of the world’s most highly-skilled digital professionals, all contributing their knowledge to make change on a national scale.
Join us for rewarding work that makes a difference across the UK. You’ll solve some of the nation’s highest-priority digital challenges, helping millions of people access services they need
Effective identity assurance is central to digital transformation and GOV.UK One Login enables people to prove who they are online, with the necessary level of confidence to access and use particular services. Our technology stack runs on AWS, using serverless compute and storage products. Backend services are written in TypeScript/Node.js and JVM technologies. Web applications also use TypeScript.
The right person will join a well motivated and multi-disciplined delivery team working to deliver on our commitments and roadmap. We are an ambitious and visionary team so if you want to be at heart of this, have a background in software delivery and are used to working in a scaled agile environment then this could be the place for you!
If this sounds like the next role for you on your career journey then we’d love to hear from you. Find out more at the GDS Blog.

JOB DESCRIPTION

As a Site Reliability Engineer at GDS you will:

• be part of one of our multidisciplinary service teams working with and supporting front-end and back-end developers, delivery and product managers, tech writers and architects
• build and maintain resilient, highly available and secure systems to meet the needs of our users
• take responsibility for solving complex and interesting problems
• create infrastructure as code to ensure our infrastructure and deployment pipelines are reusable, repeatable and reliable
• ensure our systems are appropriately monitored and instrumented to enable our teams to identify and respond to operational issues quickly and effectively
• build CI/CD pipelines to enable our developers to get their code into production as quickly and safely as possible
• act as a digital ambassador, sharing experiences through public speaking and blog posts
• participate in our in-hours 2nd line and out-of-hours support rotas to gain empathy for users and awareness of operational concerns
• share knowledge of tools and practices with your wider team and peers to drive consistency and maintain our high engineering standards

WHILST WE VALUE THE USE OF AI TECHNOLOGY TO ENHANCE OUR DAILY WORK, WE ALSO VALUE THE PERSONAL TOUCH AND URGE APPLICANTS TO WRITE RESPONSES WITHOUT THE USE OF AI TO EMPHASISE THEIR OWN UNIQUE EXPERIENCES.

Depending on how many applications we get, there might also be an extra stage before the video interview, for example a phone interview or a technical exercise.
In the Civil Service, we use Success Profiles to evaluate your skills and ability. This gives us the best possible chance of finding the right person for the job, increases performance and improves diversity and inclusivity. We’ll be assessing your technical abilities, skills, experience and behaviours that are relevant to this role.

For this role we’ll be assessing you against the following Civil Service Behaviours:

• working together
• changing and improving
• making effective decisions

We’ll also be assessing your experience and specialist technical skills against the following skills defined in the Digital, Data and Technology Profession Capability Framework for the DevOps engineer role:

• Availability and capacity management
• Development process optimisation
• Information security
• Modern development standards
• Programming and build (software engineering)
• Service support
• Systems design
• Systems integration

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)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for 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

The standard selection process for roles at GDS consists of:

• a simple application screening process - We only ask for a CV and responses to three questions. Important tip - please ensure that your CV includes how you meet the skills and experience listed in the “person specification” section above
• a 30 minute phone screen
• a 95 or 105 minute technical interview and civil service behavioural interview (conducted over video conferencing

For this role we’ll be assessing you against the following Civil Service Behaviours:

• working together
• changing and improving
• making effective decision

We’ll also be assessing your experience and specialist technical skills against the following skills defined in the Digital, Data and Technology Profession Capability Framework for the DevOps engineer role:

• Availability and capacity management
• Development process optimisation
• Information security
• Modern development standards
• Programming and build (software engineering)
• Service support
• Systems design
• Systems integratio