About the job

Job summary

This role is available in seven UK locations and can only be worked from within the UK, not overseas. If your office location is London, you will be eligible to receive London weighting. DBT employees work in a hybrid pattern, spending 2-3 days a week (pro rata) in the office on average. Changes to these working arrangements are available in certain circumstances but must be agreed with the vacancy manager and in line with the requirements of the role and can only be discussed with successful candidates. Travel to your primary office location will not be paid for by DBT, but costs for travel to an office which is not your main location will be covered.

Find out about life at DBT, our benefits and meet the team by watching our recruitment video, visiting our website or reading our blog!

 

About DBT DDaT

We are the Department for Business and Trade (DBT). We champion free trade, help British businesses unleash their potential, and create new investment opportunities. The Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) team develops and operates tools, services, and platforms such as great.gov.uk that enable the UK government to provide world leading support to businesses in the UK and overseas.

Work with us to constantly push boundaries in an environment free of heavy legacy, driven by curiosity, social purpose, diversity of thought, entrepreneurship, and the aspiration to offer an incredible experience to all our users.

Job Description

As our Lead Platform Engineer, you will lead a team of Site Reliability Engineers/Platform Engineers who are committed to delivering excellent services and continual improvement. You will drive adaption of best practices and be responsible for managing DBT’s new platform hosting.  You will influence our future hosting strategy, helping to develop the team's roadmap of work and lead the support of several services offerings including CI/CD, Account Management, Containerisation, Network Connectivity, Cloud Cost Optimisation, Service Performance and Availability.

Working with development teams to create reusable components, enabling service delivery at pace, you will automate the oversight of systems at scale, covering a hybrid cloud environment, including but not limited to AWS, GovUK PaaS, & Azure. You will participate in an on-call rota for which you will receive an additional allowance.

Job description

In your day-to-day role, you will:

• Set the Platform Engineering Teams technical direction, working with the technology leadership team
• Provide technical leadership & guidance to the Platform Engineering team through coaching and mentoring
• Lead the sharing of knowledge and good practice to develop the team’s capability
• Identify and lead on modernization initiatives through continuous improvement
• Lead the build out of the new DBT Platform on AWS and migration of services from GOV.UK PaaS
• Give development teams the tools for their job, including infrastructure, APM, exception, log aggregation, dashboards, and declarative CD/CI pipelines
• Collaboratively develop the future hosting strategy
• Actively lead the support of service offerings (Account Management, Security, CI/CD, Automation, Containerization, Service Performance & cloud Infrastructure)
• Ensure security, stability, and capacity are embedded in services deployments
• Champion the adoption of emerging technology to automate tasks & deployments
• Solve complex issues using root cause analysis, progressing opportunities to improve reliability, security, capability of infrastructure, application, and site services

Our tech stack includes:

• Amazon Web Services
• Azure
• AWS CodePipelines and AWS CodeBuild
• Terraform & AWS Copilot (CloudFormation)
• Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
• ElasticSearch/OpenSearch
• Python and Django framework
• PostgreSQL as a service (Amazon RDS)
• Sentry
• Redis/Elasticache

Person specification

Essential Skills and Experience

You should be able to demonstrate essential skills and experience of:

• Cloud experience with either Amazon Web Services (preferred), Azure or Google Cloud Platform, and a knowledge of orchestration tools and developing infrastructure as code
• Experience and fluency in one or more programming languages, writing clean and effective code
• Leadership of a technical team (managing workloads, setting direction, and liaising with colleagues to establish requirements and initiate work)
• Coaching and mentoring, identifying good practices, sharing experiences, and championing your team's agenda, acting as the voice of the team
• Deploying & managing CI/CD pipelines
• Identification of process optimization opportunities and leading teams to deliver service improvements
• Experience of information security, designing, quality-reviewing and quality-assurance solutions with security controls embedded
• Designing and reviewing systems, selecting appropriate design standards, methods and tools and ensure they are applied effectively

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £72,000, Department for Business and Trade contributes £18,306 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

Things you need to know

Selection process details

How to Apply

Unless otherwise specified, all interviews are currently being held online. Please ensure that you check your emails regularly as all updates from us will be sent to you this way.

Sift will take place week commencing: 18th March 2024

Interviews will take place week commencing: 25th March 2024

Please notes these dates are indicative and may be subject to change.

As part of the application process you will be asked to upload a CV and complete a personal statement outlining your experience, skills and fit for the role.

At the sift stage for this role, we will assess your CV and personal statement against the essential skills and experience listed above, so please ensure these documents evidence these criteria. Your personal statement should be a brief summary of a maximum 200 words.  You can use bullet points and subheadings if you prefer. As well as evidencing the criteria you should also touch upon why you're interested in DBT and in this role.

If we receive a high volume of applications, we will conduct a ‘short sift’ and read one element of your application. For this campaign a short sift would be conducted based on: CV only

If you do not meet the benchmark during the sift to be progressed to the interview stage, you may be invited to an interview for the Grade 7 Platform Engineer role which we are currently advertising here

 

How We Interview

At the interview stage for this role, you will be asked to demonstrate relevant Technical Skills and Behaviours from the Success Profiles framework. A role-specific list of these can be found below.

Applicants successful to interview stage will be asked to deliver a presentation and will be informed on the topic following the sift.

There will be a technical element within the interview where you will be asked questions about your specific professional skills and knowledge relating directly to the job role.

We will assess you against these Technical Skills during this process

• Availability and capacity management
• Information security
• Modern standards approach
• Programming and build (software engineering)
• Prototyping
• Service support
• Systems design
• Systems integration
• User focus

We will also assess you against the following behaviours:

• Communicating and Influencing
• Developing Self and Others
• Changing and Improving
• Making Effective Decisions

 

Reserve List

Appointments may be made to candidates in merit order based on location preferences. Candidates who pass the bar at interview but are not the highest scoring will be held on a 12-month reserve list for future appointments. Candidates who are judged to be a near miss at interview may be offered a post at the grade below the one advertised.

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.