Director Platform Engineering, Resilience & Cyber

Job summary

About the role

We are looking for a technical leader with deep expertise in platform engineering and cyber security to ensure the resilience, scalability and security of the government’s citizen-facing digital infrastructure. The role leads a large, multidisciplinary workforce of approximately 100 staff and operates as a trusted peer to senior stakeholders across government, ensuring the resilience, scalability, and security of critical digital platforms.

This role will focus on platform delivery, cyber strategy and technical governance, safeguarding critical systems that underpin modern digital services relied upon by millions of users each week.

You will set the strategic direction for shared platforms and infrastructure, embedding security by design and ensuring compliance with relevant frameworks. Your leadership will enable teams to build and operate high-quality services at scale, while maintaining robust defences against evolving threats.

This is a senior role requiring deep technical understanding, strong stakeholder engagement, and a track record of delivering complex digital infrastructure at scale. You will partner closely with the Director General Digital Products and other GDS Directors to drive the usability, availability and performance of critical digital infrastructure relied upon by thousands of public services and millions of users including: the GOV.UK publishing system and information engine; GOV.UK One Login; GOV.UK App and wider ecosystem of GOV.UK platform products.

Job description

Key Responsibilities

Platform Engineering & Delivery:

• Own the architecture and delivery of shared platform components (APIs, developer tools, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, shared services) and production environments that enable high-quality digital services.
• Ensure platforms are highly available, fault-tolerant, and performant, supporting 24/7 operations and rapid recovery in the event of failure. As the range of GOV.UK products and platforms grows, the need for robust, high-performance, and cost-effective shared solutions for support, live monitoring, incident management, and continuous improvement of services will become increasingly critical.
• Drive adoption of modern engineering practices, including containerisation, microservices, and automated observability.

Cyber Security:

• Define and implement the cyber security strategy for GDS platforms, embedding zero-trust principles and advanced threat detection.
• Ensure compliance with NCSC guidance, ISO standards, and relevant government security frameworks.
• Lead on secure-by-design architecture, encryption standards, and identity management.

Critical Infrastructure Resilience:

• Establish and mature robust live service operations, including real-time monitoring, automated alerting, and incident response protocols.
• Build resilience into every layer of the stack, from network to application, ensuring continuity of service under extreme load or attack scenarios.
• Oversee disaster recovery planning and execution for nation-scale systems.

Technical Governance and Roadmap:

• Own the technical roadmap for platform and infrastructure services, ensuring alignment with government priorities and emerging technologies.
• Set and enforce engineering standards for scalability, interoperability, and cost-efficiency.

Team Leadership:

• Lead multidisciplinary teams of engineers, architects, and cyber specialists.
• Foster a culture of technical excellence, innovation, and accountability, with a strong focus on continuous improvement and knowledge sharing.

Stakeholder Engagement:

• Work with senior leaders across government and industry to ensure platforms meet user needs and support transformation goals.
• Represent GDS in cross-government forums on cyber security, resilience, and digital infrastructure.

Person specification

• Strong understanding of engineering practices and evidence of leadership in designing, delivering and scaling critical and complex digital platforms and infrastructure at national or enterprise scale.
• Expertise in cloud-native architecture, platform engineering, and cyber security, including zero-trust models, identity management, encryption, and threat detection.
• Experience operating mission-critical, 24/7 live services with stringent SLAs and high security requirements.
• Strong track record in incident management, disaster recovery, and resilience planning for large-scale systems.
• Proven ability to provide strategic leadership in the establishment, governance, and enforcement of enterprise-wide technical standards, ensuring alignment with organisational strategies across diverse teams and supplier ecosystems.
• Skilled in influencing and collaborating across complex public or private stakeholder landscapes, such as government, banking and financial institutions, regulators, and industry partners.

Behaviours

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

• Leadership
• Delivering at Pace
• Making Effective Decisions
• Managing a Quality Service
• Seeing the Big Picture
• Changing and Improving

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £100,000, Department for Science, Innovation & Technology contributes £28,970 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology offers a competitive mix of benefits including:

• A culture of flexible working, such as job sharing, homeworking and compressed hours.
• Automatic enrolment into the Civil Service Pension Scheme, with an employer contribution of 28.97%.
• A minimum of 25 days of paid annual leave, increasing by 1 day per year up to a maximum of 30.
• An extensive range of learning & professional development opportunities, which all staff are actively encouraged to pursue.
• Access to a range of retail, travel and lifestyle employee discounts.

Office attendance

The Department operates a discretionary hybrid working policy, which provides for a combination of working hours from your place of work and from your home in the UK. The current expectation for staff is to attend the office or non-home based location for 40-60% of the time over the accounting period. Senior Civil Servant (SCS) staff are expected to aim for closer to 60% of the time at an office or non-home based location over the accounting period.

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours and Experience.

How to Apply

To apply for this post, please submit the following documents no later than 23:55, Monday 19th January 2026.

1. A CV setting out your career history, with key responsibilities and achievements. Please ensure you provide employment history that relates to the essential and desirable criteria, and that any gaps in employment history within the last 2 years are explained.

2. A Statement of Suitability (maximum 1250 words) explaining how you consider your personal skills, qualities, and experience provide evidence of your suitability for the role, with reference to the essential criteria in the person specification.

As part of the online process, you will be asked to complete a number of diversity-related questions. If you do not wish to provide a declaration on any of the characteristics, you will have the option to select ‘prefer not to say’. The diversity information you provide when submitting your application will help us monitor our progress towards the Civil Service becoming an inclusive employer.

The timeline later in the advert indicates the date by which a decision is expected to be made, and all candidates will be advised of the outcome as soon as possible thereafter.

Townhall

We will be hosting a 30 minute virtual townhall on Tuesday 6th January 2026 at 6:30pm where interested candidates can learn more about GDS and its ambitions. Please contact scscandidate.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk if you’d like to come along.

Assessment

If you are shortlisted, you will be asked to take part in a Staff Engagement Exercise in advance of the final panel interview and an Individual Leadership Assessment in advance of the final panel interview. This assessment will not result in a pass or fail decision. Rather, it is designed to support the panel’s decision making and highlight areas for the panel to explore further at interview. Full details of the assessment process will be provided to shortlisted candidates at the earliest opportunity. For further information regarding the assessments please visit - https://scs-assessments.co.uk/ .

Shortlisted candidates will have the option to join an informal fire side chat about the role with Christine Bellamy prior to interview. This discussion does not form part of the assessment. You may also be invited to an informal discussion with the Minister of State for Science, Research and Innovation (which will be observed by a representative of the Civil Service Commission) and / or the Permanent Secretary.

Interview

Shortlisted candidates will be invited to attend a panel interview in person at The White Chapel Building, 10 Whitechapel High St, London E1 8QS

to have a more in-depth discussion of your previous experience and professional competence in relation to the criteria set out in the Person Specification.

As part of the process there may be assessment of skills either by a presentation or simulated exercise with follow up questions. Full details of the requirements will be given to shortlisted candidates ahead of their interview.

Selection Panel

Atul Devani – Civil Service Commissioner (chair)

Christine Bellamy - Director General & Government Chief Product Officer, GDS

Ash Smith - Director GOV.UK, GDS

Another panel member may also participate, this will be confirmed before the interviews take place.

Expected Timeline

We will try and offer as much flexibility as we can, but it may not be possible to offer alternative dates for assessments or interviews. You are therefore asked to note the below timetable, exercising flexibility through the recruitment and selection process, to meet the dates given. Please note that these dates are only indicative and may be subject to change. If you anticipate any difficulties attending, please alert scscandidate.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk upon application

The anticipated timetable is as follows:

Advert Closing Date: 23:55pm, Monday 19th January 2026

Shortlist: w/c 26th January 2026

ILA Assessment: w/c 2nd February 2026

SEE Assessment: w/c 9th February 2026

Fireside chats: w/c 16th February 2026

Panel Interviews: w/c 23rd February 2026

Security Clearance

Before the appointment of the successful candidate can be confirmed, the Department will undertake background security checks. As part of this, we will need to confirm your identity, employment history over the past three years (or course details if you were in education), nationality and immigration status, and criminal record (unspent convictions only).

The level of security clearance required for this role is SC and willing to undertake DV whilst in role. More information about the vetting process can be found at the following link /united-kingdom-security-vetting-clearance-levels

Further Information

Reasonable Adjustment

We are proud to be a disability confident leader and we welcome applications from disabled candidates and candidates with long-term conditions.

Information about the Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) and some examples of adjustments that we offer to disabled candidates and candidates with long-term health conditions during our recruitment process can be found in our DSIT Candidate Guidance. A DSIT Plain Text Version of the guidance is also available.

We encourage candidates to discuss their adjustment needs by emailing the job contact which can be found under the contact point for applicants section.

If you are experiencing accessibility problems with any attachments on this advert, please contact the email address in the 'Contact point for applicants' section.

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.This role has a minimum assignment duration of 3 years. An assignment duration is the period of time a Senior Civil Servant is expected to remain in the same post to enable them to deliver on the agreed key business outcomes. The assignment duration also supports your career through building your depth of expertise.

As part of accepting this role you will be agreeing to the expected assignment duration set out above. This will not result in a contractual change to your terms and conditions. Please note this is an expectation only, it is not something which is written into your terms and conditions or indeed which the employing organisation or you are bound by. It will depend on your personal circumstances at a particular time and business needs, for example, would not preclude any absence like family friendly leave. It is nonetheless an important expectation, which is why we ask you to confirm you agree to the assignment duration set out above.

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 (opens in a new window).

See our vetting charter (opens in a new window).People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

Nationality requirements

Open to UK nationals only.

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) 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 (opens in a new window).The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.

Diversity and Inclusion

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see theCivil Service People Plan (opens in a new window) and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (opens in a new window).

Apply and further information

This vacancy is part of the Great Place to Work for Veterans (opens in a new window) initiative.Once this job has closed, the job advert will no longer be available. You may want to save a copy for your records.

Contact point for applicants

Job contact :

• Name : SCS Recruitment Team
• Email : scscandidate.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk

Recruitment team

• Email : scscandidate.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk

Further information

Appointment to the Civil Service is governed by the Civil Service Commission’s Recruitment Principles. If you feel that your application has not been treated in accordance with the recruitment principles, and wish to make a complaint, then you should contact in the first instance scscandidate.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk. If you are not satisfied with the response that you receive, then you can contact the Civil Service Commission. For further information on bringing a complaint to the Civil Service Commission please visit their web pages at: https://civilservicecommission.independent.gov.uk/contact-us/

Attachments

439897 Director Platform Engineering, Resilience & Cyber - FINAL - Read-Only Opens in new window (pdf, 2542kB)Director Platform Engineering, Resilience & Cyber - Accessibility Pack (1) Opens in new window (docx, 246kB)