Senior DevOps Engineer

Job summary

Join our innovative tech team as a Senior DevOps Engineer and help shape the experience that our devs have while we deliver services together. We’re looking for an empathetic and experienced engineer to develop and support working systems and services that encapsulate RoS policies and standards and make them rewarding to use. You’ll have the opportunity to work with a talented and collaborative team where you’ll work on interesting projects using modern technologies and have impact beyond your individual contribution.

You will have line management responsibility for more junior colleagues and contribute to capability building across the organisation.

Job description

This role is based on the UK Gov’s DDAT Senior DevOps Engineer:

• Design, implement and improve DevOps tooling and engineering workflows that enable secure, efficient and reliable product delivery, meeting the needs of users, delivery teams and service operators.

• Build, maintain and continuously improve deployment pipelines and release processes so services are repeatable, scalable, resilient and highly available.

• Provide technical leadership and hands on support to multidisciplinary delivery teams, helping to resolve complex engineering issues and improve platform performance, reliability and maintainability.

• Coach, mentor and line manage junior colleagues, supporting their development and contributing to capability building across the wider engineering community.

• Work collaboratively with product, engineering and operational colleagues to apply RoS standards, security requirements and good operational practice across the software lifecycle.

• Manage service components to ensure they meet business needs, performance targets and agreed service levels.

• Identify opportunities to improve delivery processes and contribute to implementing practical, sustainable improvements.

• Design and build solutions with appropriate security controls that reduce risk and help protect services, systems and data.

• Apply modern engineering standards, patterns and ways of working consistently, and support others to do the same.

• Design, code, test and document software or infrastructure solutions of medium to high complexity, using agreed standards, tools and engineering practices.

• Use prototyping as a collaborative team activity to test ideas, explore options and iterate towards effective technical solutions.

• Identify, investigate and resolve complex live service issues, and provide expert advice to others on service support approaches and recovery options.

• Work with user researchers and delivery colleagues to understand user needs, represent users in technical discussions and help shape solutions that improve user outcomes.

Person specification

Essential Experience

• Significant experience in software, platform or DevOps engineering roles

• Experience leading platform or infrastructure improvement work

• Experience supporting agile delivery in cross functional teams

• Experience mentoring others and contributing to engineering practice

• Experience delivering measurable service or platform outcomes

Technical Experience

• Secure, scalable cloud native and containerised platforms

• CI/CD, automation and infrastructure as code

• Observability, resilience and operational support

• Building reusable tooling, APIs and self-service capabilities
• Writing maintainable infrastructure code and automation scripts

Behaviours

Leadership

• You will provide technical leadership across platform and DevOps engineering, helping shape standards, patterns and ways of working that support secure, scalable and reliable delivery.

• You will take ownership of complex work, guide others through ambiguity and support the team to deliver high quality outcomes across the software lifecycle.
• You will mentor and support colleagues through coaching, pairing, code reviews and knowledge sharing, helping build capability across the wider engineering community, including direct line management of other colleagues.

Managing a Quality Service

• You will design, build and maintain resilient platform services that enable delivery teams to release software safely, efficiently and to a high standard.

• You will use automation, observability, testing and secure engineering practices to improve service reliability, reduce operational risk and minimise disruption for users.
• You will drive continuous improvement by identifying service issues, learning from incidents and using evidence and feedback to improve platform performance and developer experience.

Making Effective Decisions

• You will make sound technical decisions on platform design, tooling, automation and release approaches, using evidence, engineering insight and business need to guide your judgement.

• You will assess risks, dependencies and trade-offs when resolving problems or planning improvements, balancing pace of delivery with service resilience, security and long term sustainability.
• You will use data, monitoring insight and team input to make informed decisions on priorities, incident response and platform improvements.

Working together

• You will work closely with developers, product colleagues, security specialists and other stakeholders to deliver platform capabilities that meet shared goals and user needs.

• You will build effective working relationships across multidisciplinary teams, communicating clearly and contributing constructively to technical discussions, planning and problem solving.

• You will support a collaborative team culture by sharing knowledge, valuing different perspectives and contributing to communities of practice and shared engineering initiatives.

Behaviours

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

• Leadership
• Making Effective Decisions
• Managing a Quality Service
• Working Together

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £62,301, Registers of Scotland contributes £18,048 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

• 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

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.

Stage one - Application Process

To apply, click on 'Apply now' and complete the online application form.

You will need to submit:

1. A CV outlining your career history and how you meet the essential and technical criteria (max 4 pages).

1. Complete the application questions regarding the behaviours and the Experience of the role (maximum 300 words per answer in the spaces provided).

1. As part of the application process you will receive an online assessment invitation via Hackerrank and you will have 3 days to complete it.

Please note:

• If we receive a high volume of applications, we may complete an initial sift on Technical Experience

• We reserve the right to invite candidates to participate in a telephone interview prior to being further assessed.

• Applications that are not accompanied by CVs will not be scored or asnwers over 300 words will not be considered.

• We would strongly recommend that your statement is written in the STAR format (Situation, Task, Action & Result) and suggest preparing your answers using software such as MS Word or Google Docs, and then uploading the file.

• We strongly advise you review our policy on responsible use of AI in the application process. RoS may check answers with an AI detection tool and will contact you for a pre-screening call to verify your responses.

• Applications and appointments are subject to a strict merit-based assessment process, in line with the Civil Service Recruitment Principles.

Stage two – assessment

If successful at application stage, you will be invited to an in-person interview which will include the following:

• Behaviour based interview

• Technical Exercise

Behaviour based interview questions will be given to candidates 15 minutes before the start of the interview to allow candidates to prepare in advance. You will be able to take short notes with you into the interview from your preparation.

Recruitment timeline:

Close: 14th of May at 23:59

Hackerrank: 15th of May

Sift: 18th of May

Interviews: week commencing 1st of June

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

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.

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

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 : talent@ros.gov.uk
• Email : talent@ros.gov.uk

Recruitment team

• Email : talent@ros.gov.uk

Further information

Further information

For further information relating to RoS, including:

Additional details on pay & benefits

The Civil Service Code

Complaints process

Use of AI in the application/recruitment process,

If you have any questions, please contact talent@ros.gov.uk

https://ros.csod.com/ux/ats/careersite/1/home/requisition/835?c=ros