Lead DevOps Engineer

The Infected Blood Compensation Authority (IBCA) is a new arm’s-length body which is being set up, at unprecedented pace, to administer compensation to people whose lives have been impacted by the infected blood scandal.

Are you driven and ready for an exciting opportunity which will make a real impact? This is a challenging and fulfilling role that requires pace, impact, sensitivity, and compassion.

The multidisciplinary teams within IBCA’s Digital Service Directorate are organised around delivering our mission and priorities:

• To create a user-centred, empathetic end-to-end service at the heart of IBCA;
• To provide the means of paying compensation to those eligible;
• To iterate our service through starting small and scaling fast, through a test and learn approach.

A rare opportunity to apply and embed DevSecOps and Agile engineering methodologies across the breadth of a public service making a real difference. Joining IBCA early in the service lifecycle allows the Lead DevOps Engineer to provide technical leadership, build capability, and ensure platform integrity.

Job description

IBCA’s Lead DevOps Engineer will work with senior stakeholders to define, maintain and own the platform strategy and full life cycle of a cloud-based platforms and applications from designing, through deployment to supporting and enabling value release teams.

A key part of this role will be to ensure that the technical, delivery and operations impacts of platform design decisions are aligned to the technology strategy and understood by the appropriate stakeholders. To be successful, you will also need to collaborate effectively in a fast paced, transparent, multi-discipline environment.

You will be responsible for underpinning best in class development processes including; managing CI/CD tools and environments, maintaining engineering standards and automating systems to achieve quality outcomes and reduce tech debt. You’ll be an expert voice in releasing value early through automation, infrastructure-as-code, containerisation and integration.

We are looking for someone who can act as a technical platform owner, setting vision and goals for its development and iteration. You will strive to deliver better outcomes and value for money by encouraging and embedding a culture of continuous improvement. Your leadership skills will be used to lead a high performing engineering team, ensuring that solutions are delivered on time, to agreed quality standards, and are operating in an open and collaborative manner. As a leader within the Digital directorate, you will communicate a clear strategy, inspire others and establish a culture that individuals feel proud to be a part of.

Understanding GDS Service Standards for building great public services is desirable.

Person specification

Essential criteria

You will have the following skills, knowledge, and experience:

• Proven experience in a lead DevOps role, identifying and applying modern development standards to support complex projects;
• Working as part of a multi-disciplinary team to jointly develop technical designs which deliver outcomes aligned with business needs and in an iterative way;
• Practical knowledge of modern cloud-first engineering, leveraging capabilities to design and maintain secure, scalable applications, while mitigating security risks.
• Can communicate technical concepts for multidisciplinary teams and stakeholders, ensuring mutual understanding and fostering strong relationships, particularly with senior leadership;
• Demonstrates technical leadership and influencing future direction by successfully guiding design, review and quality assurance to ensure solutions are optimised and engineered to mitigate security threats.

Additional information:

A minimum 60% of your working time should be spent at your principal workplace. Although requirements to attend other locations for official business will also count towards this level of attendance.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Seeing the Big Picture
• Changing and Improving
• Making Effective Decisions
• Managing a Quality Service

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Container orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes); Infrastructure as Code (e.g. Terraform); CI/CD automation (e.g. GitHub Actions); Experience securing platforms on AWS

Benefits

• Learning and development tailored to your role.
• An environment with flexible working options.
• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity.
• A Civil Service Pension which provides an attractive pension, benefits for dependants and employer contributions of 28.97%.
• A minimum of 25 days of paid annual leave, increasing by one day per year up to a maximum of 30.