84213 - Senior Site Reliability Engineer
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.
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.
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
London: may include an allowance of up to £8,553
National: may include an allowance of up to £8,342
25/02/2024, 23:55 hours.
If you require any assistance please call 0345 241 5359 (Monday to Friday 8am - 6pm) or e mail Moj-recruitment-vetting-enquiries@gov.sscl.com
Please quote the job reference - 84213.
To apply for roles in MOJ you will need to confirm your employment history for at least 3 years prior to the date of application so that pre-employment checks (BPSS) can be undertaken. If you have spent significant time abroad (a total of 6 months in the past 3 years) you would be required to give a reasonable account of the reasons why.
For some roles you will be required to successfully complete National Security Vetting at Counter Terrorism (CTC), Security Clearance (SC) or Developed Vetting (DV) level as a condition of appointment. To meet CTC/SC/DV requirements you will normally need to have been resident in the UK for at least 3/5/10 years prior to the date of application (The level of checks that are required are stated in the advert).
If you do not meet the above requirements, you may still be considered if, for example:
- You've been serving overseas with HM Forces or in some other official capacity as a representative of HM Government
- You were studying abroad
- You were living overseas with parents
In such cases you will need to be able to provide referee cover for the period(s) of residence overseas. The duration of overseas residence and the country of abode will also be taken into account.
Success Profiles will enable a fairer and more inclusive method of recruitment by enabling us to assess the range of experiences, abilities, strengths, behaviours and technical/professional skills required for different roles. This flexible approach to recruitment focuses more on finding the right candidate for the specific role. To find out more about Success Profiles to support your application please click here for further guidance.
We have provided detail of the assessment stages and areas being assessed to help you prepare for completing your application form, and to advise of what will be assessed following this, if you successfully pass the application stage.
Application form stage assessments
Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
You must ensure that any evidence submitted as part of your application, including your CV, statement of suitability and behaviour examples, are truthful and factually accurate. Please note that plagiarism can include presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own.
Interview stage assessments
A Great Place to Work for Veterans
The "Making the Civil Service a Great Place to work for veterans" initiative includes a guaranteed interview scheme to those who meet the minimum criteria to provide eligible former members of the Armed Forces with opportunities to secure rewarding jobs. Allowing veterans to continue to serve their country, and to bring highly skilled individuals with a broad range of experience into the Civil Service in an environment, which recognises and values your previous service in the Armed Forces.
For further details about the initiative and eligibility requirements visit : https://www.gov.uk/government/news/making-the-civil-service-a-great-place-to-work-for-veterans
Redeployment Interview Scheme
Civil Service departments are expected to explore redeployment opportunities before making an individual redundant. The MoJ are committed, as part of the Redeployment Interview Scheme, to providing opportunities to those who are 'at risk of redundancy'.
MoJ are able to offer an interview to eligible candidates who meet the minimum selection criteria, except in a limited number of campaigns. Candidate's will not be eligible for the Redeployment Interview Scheme if they are applying on promotion.
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) https://www.gov.uk/settled-status-eu-citizens-families
· 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) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nationality-rules
This Vacancy is closed to applications.