Head of Data Services (Technical)

Job summary

At DSIT we’re all about improving people’s lives by maximising the potential of science & technology.

We accelerate innovation, investment and productivity through world-class science, research and development.

We use technology for good by ensuring new and existing technologies are safely developed and deployed across the UK, with the benefits more widely shared.

We are driving forward a modern digital government which gives citizens a more satisfying experience and their time back.

We do all this to enable the Government’s 5 national missions: kickstarting economic growth, making Britain a clean energy superpower, taking back our streets, breaking down barriers to opportunity and building an NHS fit for the future.

Above all, we focus on improving people’s lives. Whether it’s researching new treatments for disease, developing better batteries, reducing burdens through better public services, keeping children safe online, and much more, outcomes for citizens are at the heart of what we do.

Our Inclusive Environment

We offer flexible working benefits, employee well-being support and a great pension. We are enormously proud to be a Disability Confident Leader employer. We support candidates with adjustments throughout our recruitment process. Information about disability confidence and just some examples of the adjustments that you can request can be found in the reasonable adjustment section below.

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan and the Civil Service D&I Strategy.

Find Out More

We regularly run events where you can find out more about the department and tips for the application and interview process. You can sign up for upcoming events here: https://forms.office.com/e/Jae3B4w7xm

You can also follow our LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/dsitcareers/

Job description

About the team

DSIT has developed a cloud platform to provide analysts with the data and tooling they require for their day-to-day work ensuring government priorities are underpinned by robust data and evidence.

This leadership role is responsible for setting technical direction for delivery and ensuring operational stability of the platform and associated services. Overseeing the intersection of data engineering, DevOps and front-end development of user-facing tools, the role ensures the technical team can deliver a reliable, secure and well-governed service that meets Analyst needs and organisational priorities.

This is a senior leadership role with accountability for the technical integrity, sustainability and strategic evolution of DSIT’s core data platform. The postholder will make high-impact decisions affecting service resilience, investment, security and future capability, and will operate as a senior technical authority within the department.

The roadmap for the platform includes a scale-up to provision data and services to non-analytical users and therefore there is large scope in this role for strategic leadership, with focus on ensuring decisions are future-proofed, aligned to wider government strategy and resilient to industry advancements, especially with AI.

The cloud platform team are at the core of the data offering to the department. They will sit adjacent to, and work closely with, the Data Transformation team who will generate, manage and coordinate business demand on the platform. Data Transformation also lead on data acquisition (non-technical), data governance and data strategy, which are foundational elements to be included in platform and data services development.

This role reports into the Deputy Director for Data Science and Data Transformation and sits within the Analytical Directorate.

Your team will sit alongside the DSIT Data Science team where there will be significant professional overlap – providing a welcoming and supportive environment for you and your technical staff members. Broader community support and communities of practice exist in the department with GDS and the department’s Digital Shared Services provider.

We work in a modern engineering environment with access to the tools needed to build well, including GitHub Copilot, Claude Code and other LLM-assisted development tooling, with the ability to use these appropriately within our secure development workflows.

The role

We are looking for the technical lead for the data platform and associated services. In the short-term the role will be focused on delivering the analytical tooling capabilities and launching the service into business-as-usual delivery. Alongside this you will be defining the strategic approach to scaling up the services and meeting the data delivery needs of a wider group of stakeholders in the department.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role and you will be expected to remain close to the code and roll your sleeves up if necessary. Alongside shaping technical direction and ensuring sound engineering and architectural decisions, you will help others to develop and line manage two data engineers and two DevOps engineers. You will also be responsible for matrix management of additional resources, provided by the department’s Digital Shared Service.

Success in this role looks like maintaining a fully-functioning service that meets user needs and adapts to future requirements, whilst leading a high-performing technical team and fully supporting their development.

This role is about building and running production systems. We need someone who has designed, built, deployed and maintained systems that people rely on, with experience of the full engineering lifecycle: architecture, implementation, testing, CI/CD, observability, release, support and continuous improvement. User-centred design is a core principle for the team and experience putting users at the heart of technical delivery will be expected.

You will work very closely with the Head of Data Transformation as a peer to ensure the data platforms and associated services are completely delivering against objectives. This partnership will ensure you are able to fully focus on the technical delivery whilst they handle the majority of user engagement, system requirements, day-to-day support services for users and management of non-technical teams.

Overall accountability for delivery of the service sits with the Deputy Director, shaping the service to meet user needs and align with departmental priorities sits with the Head of Data Transformation. This role will be solely accountable for technical delivery, architectural coherence and engineering assurance across the service. This role will ensure user needs and demand are prioritised and effectively translated into sustainable technical solutions.

The ability to work very well with the Head of Data Transformation and share the load of delivery to match your individual strengths is imperative. This role and the technical team it leads will not exist in a silo.

The opportunity for this role has arisen from the evolution of our internal data function at DSIT. It represents a critical leadership role in our future operating model as a mature data team offering scalable infrastructure to enable advanced analysis and innovation.

You will work as part of the leadership team within the broader data science and data transformation area and will be expected to contribute to strategic thinking related to data and how the department can maximise its value, through your technical experience as a solutions builder. You will also be expected to represent the business area in cross-government forums to ensure the work of your teams is aligned with cross-government initiatives and we are cultivating and contributing to communities of best practice and shared technical learning. You will be a respected technical leader influencing our related interests outside of this specific workstream.

The data platform is currently a core service for the delivery of analytical work in the department. In the future there will be additional users and additional uses. The vision for what these are, how they intersect with the current build and government standards and strategies, as well as how the service operates and future decommissioning of tooling etc is entirely within scope for this role.

Current Priorities and expected areas of work:

• Initial designs for data pipelines and cloud infrastructure are finalised and have been through all relevant governance approvals.
  
• The platform is built in AWS, based on the MoJ Analytical Platform design. Infrastructure is deployed via Terraform and IaC is non-negotiable. Analytical tooling is hosted on EKS, using Helm Charts to manage Kubernetes workloads. Persistent home directories are mounted into sessions using EFS.
  
• The Data Lake is built using S3, Glue Data Catalog and Athena, with a zoning model including pre-ingestion, landing, raw and processed. Iceberg tables support table evolution and updates.
  
• The project is currently in Alpha moving into Beta in the next couple of months, with UAT for the analytical tooling imminent. Migration of analytical users is due over the summer.
  
• Alongside leading the transition into business-as-usual delivery for analysts, the role will define and maintain the long-term technical roadmap for the data platform, including scaling to new user groups, managing technical debt, planning for future technologies (including AI-enabled tooling), and shaping decisions on future platform rationalisation or decommissioning.

Person specification

• Provide technical leadership to ensure sound decisions on architecture, feasibility, trade-offs and technical direction, including information security;
  
• Be accountable for engineering quality across the products you support, including code quality, testing strategy, deployment approach, observability and operational resilience;
  
• Ensure technical best practice – refactoring of existing code, improving technical documentation, setting coding standards, improving CI/CD processes, and design, review and assure information security processes.
  
• Ensure stable data services for the department, setting up clear processes for handling any technical issues and taking proactive steps to avoid downtime (including effective approach to moving changes through dev/preprod/prod environments, including handling how receive issues raised through service desk). This should include a proactive approach to capacity management and process optimisation.
  
• Agile project management of technical team including coordinating backlog refinement, sprint planning and stand ups.
  
• Line management of technical team including matrix management of shared resources.
  
• Prioritise technical tasks, alongside the Head of Data Transformation and the Service Delivery Lead, based on user needs and organisational priorities – ensuring strategic alignment with future goals.
  
• Translate prioritised tasks into clear tickets for technical team, with input from Technical Architect/some delegation to technical team members.
  
• Problem solving & stepping in to help the technical team troubleshoot especially knotty issues across data engineering, DevOps engineering and front-end programming.
  
• Coordinate issues and decisions logging for the team, making sure key technical decisions are recorded alongside their justification for future audit purposes.
  
• You will be a trusted member of the senior leadership team for Data Science and Data Transformation, playing a key role in setting strategic direction for data in the department and occasionally deputising for the Deputy Director, to ensure leadership continuity and representation at key senior meetings.

As a line manager, you will be responsible for working with your members of staff to define their objectives, as well as managing their development and performance.

Essential Criteria

We are looking for someone with strong technical depth who enjoys being a trusted leader of teams delivering crucial services.

You should be able to demonstrate the following essential criteria:

• Excellent communication skills between technical and non-technical
  
• Broad technical understanding across data engineering, DevOps engineering and software development, including practical experience working with Kubernetes, access controls and networking in AWS.
  
• Extensive experience writing and debugging Terraform.
  
• Experience setting up and managing CI/CD pipelines for testing and deploying infrastructure at scale, e.g. GitHub Actions, AWS CodeBuild.
  
• Excellent understanding of setting up and maintaining AWS-based systems.
  
• Experience ensuring stable service provision to a range of users.
  
• Experience coaching and supporting the professional development of more junior colleagues.
  
• Setting technical direction for a complex project, balancing technical feasibility and user needs.

Desirable Criteria

An exceptional candidate would also be able to demonstrate the following desirable criteria:

• Deep technical experience managing EKS-based platforms.
  
• Experience leading a technical team to build or maintain an organisational data platform.
  
• Experience with logging, monitoring, alerting and debugging live services.
  
• Experience working in multidisciplinary public sector teams where delivery, assurance and maintainability all matter

Behaviours

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

• Leadership
• Working Together

Technical skills

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

• Systems Integration
• Modern Development Standards
• Service Support

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £69,675, Department for Science, Innovation & Technology contributes £20,184 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.

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, Experience and Technical skills.

As part of the application process you will be asked to complete a CV and personal statement. Further details around what this will entail are listed on the application form.

Please use your personal statement (in no more than 1000 words) to demonstrate how you meet the essential criteria for the role.

Applications will be sifted on CV and Personal Statement.

In the event of a large number of applicants, applications will be sifted on the CV only.

Candidates who pass the initial sift may be progressed to a full sift, or progressed straight to assessment/interview.

The interview will consist of behaviour and technical questions.

Interviewees will be asked to deliver a presentation; further details will be provided nearer the time.

The link to the technical/professional competency framework that candidates will be assessed against, for their reference: Click here

Sift and interview dates to be confirmed.

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.

If successful and transferring from another Government Department a criminal record check may be carried out.

New entrants are expected to join on the minimum of the pay band.

A location based reserve list of successful candidates will be kept for 12 months. Should another role become available within that period you may be offered this position.

Candidates who meet the minimum benchmark may be placed on a Reserve List for consideration for similar roles, including those at a lower grade. Candidates who narrowly miss the benchmark and are not placed on the Reserve List may still be considered for an offer in a similar role at a lower grade.

Please note terms and conditions are attached. Please take time to read the document to determine how these may affect you.

Any move to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology from another employer will mean you can no longer access childcare vouchers. This includes moves between government departments. You may however be eligible for other government schemes, including Tax Free Childcare; for further information visit the Childcare Choices website.

DSIT does not normally offer full home working (i.e. working at home); but we do offer a variety of flexible working options (including occasionally working from home).

DSIT cannot offer Visa sponsorship to candidates through this campaign. DSIT holds a Visa sponsorship licence but this can only be used for certain roles and this campaign does not qualify.

In order to process applications without delay, we will be sending a Criminal Record Check to Disclosure and Barring Service /Disclosure Scotland on your behalf.

However, we recognise in exceptional circumstances some candidates will want to send their completed forms direct. If you will be doing this, please advise Government Recruitment Service of your intention by emailing Pre-EmploymentChecks.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk stating the job reference number in the subject heading.

For further information on the Disclosure Scotland confidential checking service telephone: the Disclosure Scotland Helpline on 0870 609 6006 and ask to speak to the operations manager in confidence, or email Info@disclosurescotland.co.uk

Applicants who are successful at interview will be, as part of pre-employment screening, subject to a check on the Internal Fraud Database (IFD). This check will provide information about employees who have been dismissed for fraud or dishonesty offences. This check also applies to employees who resign or otherwise leave before being dismissed for fraud or dishonesty had their employment continued. Any applicant’s details held on the IFD will be refused employment.

A candidate is not eligible to apply for a role within the Civil Service if the application is made within a 5 year period following a dismissal for carrying out internal fraud against government.

Feedback

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

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

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

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.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 : Charlotte Owen
• Email : Charlotte.Owen@DSIT.gov.uk

Recruitment team

• Email : dsitresourcing.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 DSITrecruitment.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: Click here to visit Civil Service Commission/Complaints.

Attachments

DSIT T&Cs v1.2 Opens in new window (docx, 179kB)