Senior Site Reliability Engineer

at  Department for Business and Trade

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. Please click here to book your spot.

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.
Firstly, we help to build a strong, competitive business environment, where consumers are protected and companies rewarded for treating their employees properly.
Secondly, we open international markets and ensure resilient supply chains. This can be through Free Trade Agreements, trade facilitation and multilateral agreements.
Finally, we work in partnership with businesses every day, providing advance, 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.

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

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.
Find out more about life at DBT, our benefits and meet the team by watching our video or reading our blog!
Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

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) (opens in a new window)
• 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 (opens in a new window)

TYPE OF ROLE

Administration / Corporate Support
Digital
Information Technology
Other

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 make sure 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