About the job

Job summary

Are you someone who has excellent stakeholder management skills?

Do you like finding the root cause of a problem and building automated solutions to make sure it doesn’t happen again?

If so, we’d love to hear from you.

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you will drive adoption of SRE best practice across our cloud estate.

Utilising both your soft skills and technical experience, you will work with teams to ensure standards and governance is when onboarding our services into the cloud, through a dedicated assessment stage gate process. In turn, ensuring our citizen facing applications satisfy all the required operational and security needs for running in production.

You will execute deployments using runbooks, investigate production incidents and provide dedicated support to teams to determine the root cause.

You'll help to reduce toil and increase automation by developing reliability to ensure we have a reduction of the time to live, and cost spend on repetitive tasks.

Work collaboratively with development teams and provide guidance around best practice and ensure monitoring of applications is enabled.

Successful candidates will be expected to provide on-call service to help restore services, through dedicated run books or technical experience.

As part of the role, you may be required to travel regularly to the other digital hubs. The frequency of this will be discussed further should you be successful. 

Please note this role requires you to pass Security Check clearance. For further information, please see 'Selection process details'.

Job description

The SRE team will put you in the position to work with application teams across the department on developing reliable and secure solutions to provide to citizens across the UK.

You will work with development teams from the design phase to help them use good practice and department standards when building their application infrastructure.

Additionally, responsibilities of the role will include:

• Contributing authoritative advice and guidance to others in the organisation and externally
• Design and develop the techniques for improving application reliability, run books, knowledge transfer to DWP Digital's User Experience Command Centre (UXCC), and ongoing SRE strategy within your Functional and Professional Communities 
• Manage the error budget agreed with the product owner for the application and ensure that work is balanced in alignment with it
• Act as the focal point for the investigation and resolution of major or complex incidents for the service, ensuring people with the right skills and expertise are proactively available to respond effectively
• Assess the impact of change requests in consultation with stakeholders, providing technical expertise and authorising the implementation of  subsequent changes
• Manage on-call rotations such that all applications have out-of-hours SRE coverage
• Coach and mentor application development and operations engineers in the practice and techniques of SRE
• Conduct retrospectives for all high priority and major incidents ensuring they are done quickly and published
• Routinely seek views and capture ideas from stakeholders and team members for improvements and encourage collaboration and innovation
• Interdepartmental discussions and meetings with a wide variety of external bodies and organisations on a local, regional, national or international basis, leading community discussions about SRE best practice within Engineering

Check out these blogs about Working in DWP's hybrid cloud services group and Sam's life in the clouds

Person specification

When giving details in your employment history and personal statement you should highlight your experience in line with essential criteria below:

• * LEAD CRITERIA: Experience of scripting to automate processes, removing toil including infrastructure and configuration as code
• Skills in building and improving CI / CD Pipelines
• Experience of resolution of complex technical incidents
• Experience of reliability engineering including capacity and performance management through monitoring, logging and alerting
• Experience of orchestration platforms and tools for hosting and managing containerised applications
• Experience of engaging with stakeholders at multiple levels to provide feedback and support

* An initial sift may be conducted using the lead criteria stated above. Candidates who pass the initial sift will progress to a full sift. 

If you would like to learn more about the role, please contact richard.hanley@dwp.gov.uk.

Benefits

• An employer pension contribution of up to 28.97% For further information please click here.
• Annual leave rising up to 30 days, (based on your working pattern).
• Family friendly flexible working arrangements, such as hybrid working, job sharing, term-time working, flexi-time and compressed hours.
• Learning and development tailored to your role this could include industry recognised qualifications, coaching and mentoring. 
• An inclusive and diverse environment with opportunities to join staff networks including: Women’s Network, National Race Network, National Disability Network (THRIVE) and many more.

Salary Information

Pay for this role is from £52,412 to £78,517.

The maximum salary for the grade is £63,517, however a Digital Allowance of up to £15,000 per annum is available for exceptional candidates, based on our assessment of your skills and experience.

Our offer to successful candidates will be based on an assessment of your skills and experience as demonstrated at interview.

Existing Civil Servants who secure a new role on lateral transfer should maintain their current salary.

Existing Civil Servants who gain promotion may move to the bottom of the next grade pay scale or 10% increase in salary whichever would be the greater.

Things you need to know

Selection process details

Stage 1: Application

Your application will consist of three parts:

1. A Personal Details application form.

2. Your employment history detailing your responsibilities, skills, accomplishments, plus your qualifications and relevant training. Please copy this information into the box field provided.

3. Personal statement up to 1250 words. Further details around what this will entail are listed on the application form.

When giving details in your employment history and personal statement you should highlight your experience in line with essential criteria listed in the Person Specification.

The sift panel will use the information in your employment history and personal statement to assess your experience, skills and knowledge against the essential criteria above.

For Hints and Tips on completing your application visit Applying for jobs at DWP Digital.

Applications will be sifted at regular intervals from the date the posts are advertised. Please apply as soon as you can, do not wait until the end of the campaign. 

Important Information

• You will be asked to complete your employment history any information that you would customarily share on a CV should therefore be entered onto the application form.
• Personal details that could be used to identify you including your name, contact details and address must be removed for your application to be considered.
• If your employment history/personal statement contains any personal details your application will be withdrawn.

Stage 2: Interview

If you’re successful at sift stage you will be invited to a video interview via Microsoft Teams. There, you will be assessed against the experiences listed in the essential criteria.

Candidates invited for interview: Interview Presentation.

Those candidates invited for interview are asked  to prepare a presentation for interview, of no more than 15 minutes on the topic:

Provide an overview of the purpose and best practices Site Reliability Engineering.

What do you bring to the role and how will you apply it in DWP Digital?

Interviews will take place from early September 2024. Interview dates to be confirmed.

Further information

Find out more about Working for DWP

A reserve list may be held for a period of 6 months from which further appointments can be made.

All successful candidates and those placed on reserve will be posted in merit list order by location. 

Security Clearance Requirement

You must meet the security requirements before you can be appointed. The level of security needed is security check.

For meaningful checks to be carried out, you will need to have lived in the UK for a sufficient period of time, to enable appropriate checks to be carried out and produce a result which provides the required level of assurance. Whilst a lack of UK residency in itself is not necessarily a bar to a security clearance, and expectation of UK residency may range from 3 to 5 years. Failure to meet the residency requirements needed for the role may result in the withdrawal of provisional jobs offers. 

NSV

For further information on National Security Vetting please visit the following page https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/demystifying-vetting

The Civil Service values honesty and integrity and expects all candidates to abide by these principles. Please ensure that all examples provided in your application are taken directly from your own experience and that you describe the examples in your own words. Applications will be screened and if evidence of plagiarism or copying examples/answers from other sources is found, your application will be withdrawn. Internal DWP candidates may also face disciplinary action.

Reasonable Adjustment

At DWP we value diversity and inclusion and actively encourage and welcome applications from everyone, including those that are underrepresented in our workforce.

We consider visible and non-visible disabilities, neurodiversity or learning differences, chronic medical conditions, or mental ill health. Examples include dyslexia, epilepsy, autism, chronic fatigue, or schizophrenia.

If you need a change to be made so that you can make your application, you should: Contact Government Recruitment Service via DigitalRecruitment.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk as soon as possible before the closing date to discuss your needs.

Complete the “Reasonable Adjustments” section in the “Additional requirements” page of your application form to tell us what changes or help you might need further on in the recruitment process. For instance, you may need wheelchair access at interview, or if you’re deaf, a Language Service Professional.

For further information on reasonable adjustments, terms and conditions and how we recruit visit the How we recruit page. 

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.