About the job

Job summary

This is a National Role

Job description

We encourage applications from people from all backgrounds and aim to have a workforce that represents the wider society that we serve. We pride ourselves on being an employer of choice. We champion diversity, inclusion and wellbeing and aim to create a workplace where everyone feels valued and a sense of belonging. To find out more about how we do this visit: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/ministry-of-justice/about/equality-and-diversity.

Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Location: London/National

Closing Date: 25th February

Interviews: 6 & 7 March

Grade: Grade 7

(MoJ candidates who are on a specialist grade, will be able to retain this grade on lateral transfer)

Salary:

London: £58,847 - £67,400 (which may include an allowance of up to £8,553)

National: £54,358 - £62,700 (which may include an allowance of up to £8,342)

Working pattern: Full time, Flexible working, Job-share and part-time (min. 80%) also considered

Contract Type: Permanent

Vacancy number: 84213

*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

This is a great opportunity for an experienced Site Reliability Engineer, or an experienced DevOps Engineer looking to move into SRE space, to work as part of the Digital Prisons Service Live Support Team, responsible for growing the operational maturity, quality and performance of our portfolio of Digital Services alongside our growing Digital Prisons product teams. The role is pivotal in continuing to provide a high quality service to our colleagues across HMPPS, and forms a key part of Digital Prison’s delivery practice.

Digital Prison Service exists to create the tools that support the Prison Service so that they can provide decent, safe and productive places to live and work, and support prisons to protect the public and reduce reoffending by rehabilitating the people in our care through education and employment. Our Live Services mission is to ensure that the Digital Prison’s underpinning technology and services operate for those accessing our digital services throughout the HMPPS estate.

Key Responsibilities:

The Site Reliability Engineering team is responsible for the overall development of reliability engineering in Digital Prisons Services.

This will include being able to:

• help to identify and promote best practice in reliability engineering
• design, build and test systems and processes to support software development and deployment
• work in a multidisciplinary manner across the programme by working with developers, technical architects, product managers and others, to provide robust, resilient and scalable platforms
• help to ensure the programme has the right processes in place, including identifying and measuring important metrics to drive continual improvement
• work with colleagues on identification of technical risks in relation to the infrastructure, as well as plans to resolve or mitigate the risks
• communicate concerns, risks and issues with the broader team and senior management
• prioritise and deliver recommendations and improvements in response to incident reviews
• set an example for and encourage open, positive, and constructive communication both within the team and when communicating with other DPS teams
• cultivate and maintain relationships with other teams within DPS and Justice Digital, the MoJ's Department responsible for Digital Services.
• collaborate effectively with other site reliability engineers and developers
• work with teams, Cyber Security and Information Assurance to ensure the ongoing integrity and security of our service and infrastructure
• provide coaching and mentoring to more junior colleagues and line manage a small group of less experienced SRE engineers
• help with hiring, taking part in recruitment of other SRE engineers and technical staff

To help picture your life at MoJ Justice Digital please take a look at our blog and our Digital and Technology strategy 2025

Person Specification

We’re interested in people who:

• have experience of working with technologies that underpin digital services such as databases, web servers, DNS, CDNs, reverse proxies, message queues and load balancers
• have an understanding of version control (ideally with Git)
• are familiar with container orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes, ECS or Cloud Foundry; or serverless application design such as AWS Lambda
• have worked with public cloud providers such as Azure, AWS or Google Cloud in a production system
• have an understanding of SRE principles such as capacity planning, SLOs and SLIs and how to design and support resilient, large scale, high performance services in a production environment
• can deploy monitoring tools to ensure systems are appropriately monitored and instrumented to enable teams to identify and respond to operational issues quickly and effectively
• are familiar with at least one programming language (we mainly use Node.js, Java and Kotlin)
• have a strong preference for automation and experience of using Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform
• enjoy learning and helping others

We welcome the unique contribution diverse applicants bring and do not discriminate on the basis of 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.

Willingness to be assessed against  the requirements for BPSS clearance.

We will also be assessing your experience and specialist technical skills against the following skills defined in the DDaT Senior DevOps role:

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

Benefits

• 37 hours per week and flexible working options including working from home, working part-time, job sharing, or working compressed hours.
• We are committed to nurturing our staff and provide lots of training and development opportunities with learning platforms such as: Linux Academy, O’Reilly, Pluralsight, Microsoft Learning, Civil Service Learning, GDS Academy, etc.
• 10% dedicated time to learning and development with a budget of £1000 a year per person
• Generous civil service pension based on defined benefit scheme, with employer contributions of 26-30% depending on salary.
• 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. And maternity support/paternity leave at full pay for 2 weeks, too!
• 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.
• Free membership to BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT.
• Some offices may have a subsidised onsite Gym.

Terms & Conditions

Please review our Terms & Conditions which set out the way we recruit and provide further information related to the role and salary arrangements.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact recruitment@digital.justice.gov.uk

Person specification

Please refer to attached Job Description

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £54,358, Ministry of Justice contributes £15,165 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

Candidates must submit a CV and a suitability statement of no more than 500 words which describes how you meet the requirements set out in the Person Specification above.

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:

• Working together
• Managing a quality service
• Developing self and others

Your application will be reviewed against the Person Specification above by a diverse panel.

Successful candidates who meet the required standard will then be invited to a 90-minute panel interview held via video conference.

Should we receive a high volume of applications, a pre-sift based on experience, as well as knowledge of data analytics processes will be conducted prior to the sift.

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.