Job Description
Lead Site Reliability Engineer
Location: National*
Closing Date: 1st February
Interviews: expected w/c 16th February
Grade: 6
(MoJ candidates who are on a specialist grade, will be able to retain this grade on lateral transfer)
Salary:
London: £75,674- £87,875 which may include an allowance up to £12,201
National: £71,381- £83,700 which may include an allowance up to £12,319
Working pattern: Full-time, part-time, flexible working
Contract Type: Permanent
Vacancy number: 13940
*We offer a hybrid working model, allowing for a balance between remote work and time spent in your local office. Office locations can be found ON THIS MAP
The Role
We’re recruiting for a Lead Site Reliability Engineer here at Justice Digital, to lead our site reliability engineering team in HMPPS Digital.
Within the team, you will be helping to build and maintain platforms that underpin the digital services we are delivering. You will work closely with development teams, cloud platforms teams, live service teams and security teams to help maintain and develop services. We use modern best practices like DevOps and agile, use cloud native architectures and prefer modern open-source tools.
This role aligns against the Lead DevOps Engineer role from the Government Digital and Data Framework.
About Us:
At Justice Digital, we're dedicated to leveraging technology to drive impactful change across the justice system. As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer, you'll play a pivotal role in enhancing access to justice and improving outcomes for users through innovative digital solutions.
Responsibilities: You’ll be working on our acclaimed open-source public services, with user needs at the heart of everything, helping us transform Government for the future. Working as part of a multi-disciplinary team, you’ll be helping define how we do what we do and making sure that our systems are built to be changed rapidly, leading teams of site reliability engineer specialists across teams.
Collaboration: You’ll collaborate closely with software developers, product managers, designers, delivery managers, technical architects and content specialists who share our vision of leveraging technology to transform government services.
Our Tech Stack
Technologies: We use a diverse range of technologies, and we’re seeking individuals who specialise in one or more and are eager to learn new languages and frameworks. Our tech stack includes:
○ Cloud infrastructure: AWS
○ Infrastructure as code: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation
○ Containerisation: Docker
○ CI/CD deployments: GitHub Actions, Concourse, CircleCI
○ Application code: Python, Ruby, JavaScript
Learning and Support: Once part of Justice Digital, we'll support you in mastering our tech stack, regardless of your current experience. Explore our GitHub for insights into our technologies and the services we develop and maintain.
Our Community: Join over 150 experienced software and site reliability engineers who form our vibrant engineering community across the MoJ. You’ll have opportunities to mentor junior colleagues and participate in informal support networks with peers. We encourage active engagement in shaping our engineering culture and community.
Career Development: We take pride in our supportive and effective line management. Your skills are highly valued, and we’re committed to helping you expand them within the civil service. You'll have opportunities to move between teams or departments, explore new technologies, and take on increased responsibilities aligned with your career goals.
Explore Further: Dive deeper into our work and culture by visiting our Developer Blog and Justice Digital Blog.
Key Responsibilities:
As a Lead DevOps engineer, you will:
Provide strong leadership to set the future site reliability engineering strategy for a fast paced, demanding environment
Take ownership of improving the site reliability engineering capability across the large number of diverse development and engineering teams
Work with the Head of Profession, the wider engineering leadership team and development operations community to ensure we build maintainable and sustainable digital products across Digital & Technology
Work closely with the Service Owner to ensure provision of a high-quality, cost-effective service.
Stay up to date with, and lead the creation of standards around development operations practices and techniques to best enable our teams to consistently deliver at pace
Mentor the site reliability engineers, through the design and implementation of solutions whilst ensuring alignment with the orginisations standards, identifying opportunities for collaboration where appropriate.
Collaborate with technical architects and software developers to build and maintain a strong site reliability culture
Advocate user-centric, agile approaches which focus on rapid, effective delivery of high-quality digital services
Assist in transforming technical requirements into automated processes including managing tools and testing environments, central code control, maintaining development standards and writing software that automates systems
Support site reliability team in delivering automated software components that form part of a tool chain and transform technical requirements into automated processes
Work collaboratively and supportively with other local professions leads to identify and resolve technical, operational and business issues preventing delivery.
Support sharing of methods and technologies across teams, government, and the industry by helping to organise events
Help publicise our achievements and learning, and celebrate our successes through blog posts, social media and/ or speaking at events/ conferences
Build and maintain a diverse, inclusive culture within the local web operations community, growing awareness, inclusivity, and balance
Participate in support out of hours on a rotational basis as required (for which you’ll be paid an allowance)
Coordinate and manage site reliability engineering recruitment, shaping our in-house team, making it more diverse and inclusive
If this feels like an exciting challenge, something you are enthusiastic about, and want to join our team please read on and apply!
Benefits
37 hours per week and flexible working options including working from home, working part-time, job sharing, or working compressed hours.
A £1k per person learning budget is in place to support all our people, with access to best in class conferences and seminars, accreditation with professional bodies, fully funded vocational programmes and e-learning platforms
Staff have 10% time to dedicate to develop & grow
Generous civil service pension based on defined benefit scheme, with employer contributions of 28.97% from April 1st 2024 (Contribution Rates)
25 days leave (plus bank holidays) and 1 privilege day usually taken around the Kings’ birthday. 5 additional days of leave once you have reached 5 years of service.
Compassionate, maternity, adoption, and shared parental leave policies, with up to 26 weeks leave at full pay, 13 weeks with partial pay, and 13 weeks further leave for maternity leave. And maternity support/paternity leave at full pay for 2 weeks.
Wellbeing support including access to the Calm app.
Nurturing professional and interpersonal networks including those for Carers & Childcare, Gender Equality, PROUD and SPIRIT
Bike loans up to £2500 and secure bike parking (subject to availability and location)
Season ticket loans, childcare vouchers and eye-care vouchers.
5 days volunteering paid leave.
Some offices may have a subsidised onsite Gym.
Person Specification
Essential:
Technical Leadership and Collaboration
Provides day-to-day technical leadership, setting standards for build, deployment and operational practices working across platform, security and delivery teams.
Programming and Build (Software Engineering)
Designs, codes, tests, reviews, and documents software of medium to high complexity, applying sound engineering principles to balance innovation with operational stability.
Service Support and Reliability
Leads incident resolution in live environments, ensuring root causes are addressed, fixes are repeatable, and support documentation is robust.
Improves observability, monitoring, and service recovery based on real-world support experience, enhancing reliability across services.
Systems Design and Integration
Shapes and reviews system designs for architectural alignment, leading integration efforts to ensure interoperability and smooth deployment across shared environments.
Continuous Improvement and Delivery Practice
Drives platform consistency through automation and repeatability, identifying and implementing improvements in pipelines, monitoring, and infrastructure-as-code practices.
Balances delivery speed with long-term maintainability and security, ensuring sustainable engineering practices across teams.
Platform and Organisational Context
Guides teams in delivering secure, compliant, and efficient solutions by applying deep knowledge of MoJ cloud platforms and shaping best practices aligned with broader engineering strategy.
Willingness to be assessed against the requirements for SC clearance
We welcome the unique contribution diverse applicants bring and do not discriminate based on culture, ethnicity, race, nationality or national origin, age, sex, gender identity or expression, religion or belief, disability status, sexual orientation, educational or social background or any other factor.
Our values are Purpose, Humanity Openness and Together. Find out more here about how we celebrate diversity and an inclusive culture in our workplace.
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.
How to Apply
Candidates must submit CV outlining their work history and a Statement of Suitability (max words 500 total). Failure to submit both documents, will result in a rejection of your application.
Statement of Suitability:
During the application process, candidates should outline their experience and suitability, in no more than 250 words per section, against the following 2 criteria (500 words max)
Provides day-to-day technical leadership, setting standards for build, deployment and operational practices working across platform, security and delivery teams.
Balances delivery speed with long-term maintainability and security, ensuring sustainable engineering practices across teams.
Successful candidates who meet the required standard will then be invited to a 1-hour panel interview held via video conference.
Application Guidance
Please access the following link for guidance on how to apply and how to complete a Personal Statement
In Justice Digital, we recruit using a combination of the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability and Success Profiles Frameworks. We will assess your Experience, Technical Skills and the following Behaviours during the assessment process:
Leadership
Delivering at Pace
Making Effective Decisions
Working Together
A diverse panel will review your application against the Person Specification above.
Should you be unsuccessful in the role that you have applied for but demonstrate the capability for a role at a lower level, we reserve the right to discuss this opportunity with you and offer you the position without needing a further application.
A reserve list may be held for up to 12 months, from which further appointments may be made.
Use of 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 for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.
Terms & Conditions
Please review our Terms and Conditions which set out how we recruit and provide further information related to the role and salary arrangements.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact digitalanddatarecruitment@justice.gov.uk
