Engineer - Cloud Infrastructure

Job summary

Working within a small team of like-minded technical professionals, this role will play an essential part in designing, implementing, operating, and improving enterprise cloud technology services within the organisation to help meet its mission and goals—with a growing focus on quality, automation, and testing.

You will work across numerous agile multidisciplinary teams including Architecture, Software Engineering, Data, Security and Operations, playing a part in the technical and service roadmaps that enable us to deliver excellent digital services that support Government housing policy and line of business systems. While your primary focus will remain on the Homes England Cloud Hosting Service (built on MS Azure products), you will also help teams improve how services are tested, validated, and released—supporting our ambition to ‘World Class’ and deliver with greater confidence and reliability. This role combines Infrastructure, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, and a strong emphasis on service quality and test automation.

We’re in the early stages of our transformation, so now is a great time to join us for this opportunity to help form what will be both a challenging and fun time to be working on these changes. You will help shape how we embed testing and automation into our cloud platform and delivery processes.

Job description

Having technical knowledge is great, but being able to apply it collaboratively and practically is essential. You will work closely with colleagues within the Digital Team and across the business, helping teams understand and improve how services are tested, validated, and released. Understanding your audiences and framing problems and solutions for their understanding is a key skill.

You will be resilient and comfortable managing stakeholders, with discussions shaped by a good understanding of commercial and operational impact. You will be able to work through ambiguity and legacy complexity, and help teams move towards more automated, secure, and reliable approaches without losing sight of operational reality.

You will have significant experience working at technical level with a proven track record of leading and delivering on infrastructure and platform-related outcomes, including the ability to articulate this in a meaningful way to stakeholders. Experience with test automation, quality assurance, or improving delivery confidence is highly valued.

You will have a good understanding of other areas within Digital such as Operations, Information Security, Software Engineering, Data and Architecture, enabling you to contribute to our methodologies and frameworks and promote good practice in testing and automation.

An innovative and collaborative approach to solving technical problems is essential, as is the ability to manage expectations and communicate technical issues and proposed solutions in a way that is meaningful to different audiences.

Person specification

IT Infrastructure. Design, implement, administer, and support infrastructure technologies and solutions covering compute, storage, networking, IaaS, PaaS & SaaS across physical, virtual and cloud computing environments. Experience with test automation, quality assurance, or improving delivery confidence in these environments is highly valued.

Having at least MS Certified: Azure Fundamentals or equivalent experience is essential. Some of our specific technologies are: Azure DevOps, ARM Templates, PowerShell, Bash, SQL, Kubernetes, Power BI, among others within the Azure stack. Our IaC languages are Terraform & ARM.

Testing & Automation. Design and implement automated testing approaches for platform and application services, working with engineering teams to discover current manual testing activities, identify high-value scenarios for automation, and build automated checks into delivery and operational processes to improve service quality, security assurance and release confidence.

Troubleshooting and Problem Solving. You can initiate and monitor actions to logically investigate the correlation of events and trends, breaking down problems into their component parts to identify and diagnose root causes. You understand how infrastructure, application behaviour and test coverage interact in complex environments.

Systems Design. You design systems based on numerous factors such as risk, impact, complexity as well as internal governance such as strategy, standards and principles to ensure alignment and collaborative delivery. You help shape how services can be prepared for transition towards more automated, reliable and testable platforms.

Information Security. Understanding of infosec, types of security controls, standards and practices used to mitigate security threats within solutions. You apply these appropriately to reduce risk and embed security into engineering workflows.

Software Development. You understand the software development lifecycle and its part within the wider delivery of modern software services, including how application engineering, infrastructure, testing, security and release practices work together. Knowledge of both tools, technologies, standards and ways of working.

Please refer to the DDAT page for further information on skill levels https://www.gov.uk/guidance/skill-levels-for-digital-data-and-technolog…

Benefits

Homes England is an executive non-departmental public body with its own terms and conditions, benefits and pension scheme. We are a government agency working in partnership with the private sector and want to employ and retain great people. In return we offer a range of excellent benefits, some of the key benefits include:

Holiday - Homes England offers all staff 33 days annual leave per year in addition to 8 statutory bank holidays.

Working Flexibly - At Homes England we have a strong culture of flexible working and encourage all employees to have a healthy work/life balance. We offer a wide range of potential working patterns, including part time, job share and compressed hours.

Health and Wellbeing - We offer health screening with Nuffield Proactive Health Clinics, a free Employee Assistance Programme which offers confidential support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week as well as access to Occupational Health.

Professional Development - At Homes England we are committed to your continued professional and personal development with learning as one of our core values. We pay for one job-related professional membership subscription per year for our employees.

We also offer an excellent range of family friendly benefits, for example, maternity, paternity, shared parental leave.

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

How to apply?

To apply please follow the links to our careers page.

Security

Successful candidates must pass a disclosure and barring security check.

Selection process details

For more information on the role, please see the attached Job Description.

Successful applicants will be advised of the outcome of their application and interviews held as soon as practical after the closing date. Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment. We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your interest in this role and Homes England.

Please note – Homes England has a responsibility to ensure compliance with HMG Baseline Personnel Security Standard to address the potential problems of identity fraud, illegal working and deception generally. To ensure compliance we will carry out a pre-employment Personal Identity and Vetting Report through Experian to meet the standard and you will therefore be asked to provide certain information in order that the verification check can be carried out if you are successful in your application.

Homes England are an equal opportunities employer and positively encourages applications from suitably qualified and eligible candidates. We are proud to be an equal opportunities employer that values and respects the people who work for us. Our aim is to be an employer of choice, enabling everyone to reach their full potential.

Homes England is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal data. For further information please refer to our Privacy Notice which can be viewed here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/homes-england/about/personal-information-charter

Nationality requirements

Open to UK, Commonwealth and European Economic Area (EEA) and certain non EEA nationals. Further information on whether you are able to apply is available here.

Working for the Civil Service

Please note this Post is NOT regulated by the Civil Service Commission.

The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equality of opportunity. There is a guaranteed disability confident interview scheme for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.

Further information

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

Name: Recruitment Team

Email: recruitmentinfo@homesengland.gov.uk

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

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check.People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

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)

Working for the Civil Service

Please note this Post is NOT regulated by the Civil Service Commission.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.

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

The Civil Service welcomes applications from people who have recently left prison or have an unspent conviction. Read more about prison leaver recruitment (opens in new window).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 : Recruitmentinfo@homesengland.gov.uk
• Email : Recruitmentinfo@homesengland.gov.uk

Recruitment team

• Email : Recruitmentinfo@homesengland.gov.uk