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.

Our Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) team develops and operates tools, services, and platforms that enable the UK government to provide world leading support to businesses in the UK and overseas.

You’ll get 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. Find out more on our blog, Digital Trade. 

 

We are on a mission to build a new cutting edge developer platform in AWS and migrate existing DBT services from GOV.UK PasS in the process. Are you up to the challenge of building something new? We need Platform Engineers to make sure our Internet services are hosted the most performant, secure and feature rich platform to meet at the developer experience.

Job description

As a Senior Platform Engineer, you will work to give development teams the tools for their job, including application performance monitoring, exception, log and metrics aggregation, dashboards, and declarative CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) pipelines.

You’ll evangelise product teams about service-level indicators, objectives, and error budgets, and negotiate them. You’ll help build and scale our global product platform and participate in an on-call rota for which you will receive an additional allowance.

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, Azure or Google Cloud 
• Ability to build code-defined, reliable, and well tested infrastructure on top of cloud computing systems (e.g., AWS Copilot, Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) 
• Experience and fluency in one or more programming languages, writing clean and effective code  
• Experience in designing, analysing, and troubleshooting distributed systems 
• Knowledge of Linux/Unix fundamentals and TCP/IP networking 
• Ability to see user impact in the infrastructure and platform changes, including a drive to improve the Developer Experience at every turn  

Desirable Skills and Experience

These are not essential but it would be ideal if you could demonstrate:

• PaaS, Kubernetes, Django, oauth2/saml2 integrations in Python
• Experience in defining and measuring Service Level Objectives
• Experience in observability driven development
• Experience in prototyping through reuse of existing Open Source components

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £55,400, Department for Business and Trade contributes £14,337 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: 22nd April 2024

Interviews will take place week commencing: 29th April 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.

 

How you’ll be assessed 

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.

The technical element within the interview, where you will be asked a series of questions to demonstrate your specific professional skills and knowledge related directly to the job role and context, will assess against capabilities which are outlined under DevOps engineer within the DDaT framework which can be found here. As part of this process, you will be asked to complete a technical problem-solving exercise during your interview. More details will be provided following sift.

These Technical Skills you’ll be assessed against are:

• Availability and capacity management
• Development process optimisations
• Information security
• Modern standards approach
• Programming and build (software engineering)
• Prototyping (with MVP and POC)
• Systems integration
• User focus

You will also be assessed against the Behaviours of:

• Communicating and Influencing
• Developing Self and Others

 

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.

  

Security Clearance Details

This role requires you to undergo Security Clearance. The requirement for SC clearance is to have been present in the UK for at least 3 of the last 5 years. You will be asked to provide evidence of your UK footprint where you have been physically present in the UK. Failure to meet the residency requirements will result in your security clearance application being rejected.

If you require SC clearance you will need to provide evidence of the below requirements.

Checks will be made against:

• Departmental or company records (personnel files, staff reports, sick leave reports and security records)
• UK criminal records covering both spent and unspent criminal records
• Your credit and financial history with a credit reference agency
• Security Services record
• Location details

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.