Lead Systems Engineer

NHS England; Leeds, Exeter; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 93,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

RRP bonus

Job summary

NHS England is seeking a Lead Systems Engineer to lead multidisciplinary teams delivering and operating national, highly available distributed systems used by hundreds of thousands of users daily, with a 99.9%+ availability target.

You will own architecture across applications, infrastructure, CI/CD, testing and monitoring; collaborate to raise engineering maturity; coach colleagues to develop the team and drive improvements.

Qualifications

• Masters degree in a relevant subject or equivalent experience.
• Experience taking a lead role, driving design decisions, managing stakeholders, and providing technical leadership.
• Experience implementing quality-focused development practices and testing techniques.

Responsibilities

• Develop, build and operate national, highly available distributed systems.
• Take technical ownership across applications, environments, infrastructure and networks, pipelines, and operational tools.
• Collaborate with peers to raise engineering standards across the organisation. Coach and mentor colleagues.

Skills

Technical leadership

Quality-focused development

Education

Masters degree

Job description

A Lead Systems Engineer is typically the technical lead for multidisciplinary teams delivering and operating multiple components within a system.

We work on national, highly available distributed systems built and run by in house teams. These systems can differ in size, scale and purpose, but an example system would:

• Have a round-the-clock requirement to be available to a level of 99.9% or higher
• Have a national-scale impact on unavailability, and cope with the load associated with a daily transactional user-base of more than one hundred thousand people
• Adopt modern Cloud best-practices and open standards to support interoperability and re-usability
• Achieve high availability through operational simplicity.
• Provide flexible low-cost horizontal scale out to handle expected and unexpected variations in load.
• Handle the architectural trade-offs necessary to avoid logical bottlenecks
• Provide security controls appropriate for the storage of large volumes of sensitive data - hundreds of millions of records and documents.
• Have a direct clinical impact on patient care.

These national critical systems enable safe, reliable identification across health and care, supporting services used by hundreds of thousands of people every day.

We have an exciting opportunity to join multidisciplinary product teams in Products and Platforms across a range of national services.

Main duties of the job

As a Lead Systems Engineer, you will:

• Develop, build and operate national, highly available distributed systems within NHS England.
• Work within and contribute to NHS England engineering principles.
• Take technical ownership across the system space, including applications, environments, infrastructure and networks, pipelines, and operational tools.
• Collaborate with peers to solve engineering problems and raise engineering standards across the organisation. This is a significant part of the Lead Systems Engineer role, in the order of 25% of time.
• Drive engineering maturity within the team.
• Coach and mentor colleagues to support team development.

Candidates will need to demonstrate experience of the following

• Experience working on a complex application across all layers of the stack including application, infrastructure, CI/CD, testing, monitoring and alerting etc.
• Implementing quality-focused development practices and testing techniques
• Experience of taking a lead role, for example driving design decisions, managing stakeholders effectively, and providing technical leadership.
• Experience of driving and implementing improvements within a product or team.
• Working within a team to deliver software in a collaborative way, including coaching and mentoring colleagues to develop the team and contribute to a strong engineering culture.

About us

NHS England has a wide range of statutory functions, responsibilities and regulatory powers. These are focused on supporting the wider NHS to deliver high quality care, as well as doing those things that are best done once for the whole NHS.

Our staff bring expertise across clinical, operational, commissioning, technology, data science, cyber security, software engineering, education, and commercial specialisms -- enabling us to design and deliver high-quality NHS services.

In March 2025, the Government announced that NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care will increasingly merge functions, ultimately leading to NHS England being fully integrated into the department.

If you currently work within the NHS and if successful at interview, we will initiate an Inter Authority Transfer (IAT) via the Electronic Staff Record (ESR).This retrieves key data from your current or previous NHS employer to support onboarding, including competency status, Continuous Service Dates (CSD), and annual leave entitlement. You may opt out at any stage of the process.

Colleagues with a contractual office base are expected to spend, on average, at least 40% of their time working in our offices.

Staff recruited from outside the NHS will usually be appointed at the bottom of the pay band.

We cannot offer visa sponsorship for any vacancies.

Job responsibilities

The post of Lead Systems Engineer has been awarded a Recruitment and Retention Premia (RRP) in response to current labour market conditions. In recognition of this, the role attracts an additional monthly RRP payment equal to 20% per annum.

Please be aware that RRP is none contractual and subject to review.

On-call

Participation in a shared on-call rota may be required to support a 24/7/365 service, this rota covers evenings, weekends, and public holidays.

Security Clearance

Successful candidates may need to meet the requirements for Security Check (SC) clearance to access live systems and sensitive data.

You can find further details about the role, including key responsibilities and accountabilities, and person specification in the attached Job Description.

Person Specification

Qualifications

• Masters degree in a relevant subject or equivalent experience

Experience

• Experience of working on a complex application across all layers of the stack including application, infrastructure, CI/CD, testing, monitoring and alerting etc.
• Experience of taking a lead role, for example driving design decisions, managing stakeholders effectively, and providing technical leadership

Skills

• Implementing quality-focussed development practices and testing techniques

Experience

• Working within a team to deliver software in a collaborative way, including coaching and mentoring colleagues to develop the team and contribute to a strong engineering culture.

Disclosure and Barring Service Check

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.

Employer name

NHS England

Address

Wellington Place / Wellington House / Hexagon House

£79,898.40 to £92,841.60 a yearper annum, inclusive of 20% RRP (excl. London weighting)

Contract

Permanent

Working pattern

Full-time,Part-time,Job share,Flexible working

Reference number

990-TDD-P&P-EC4624-E

Job locations

Wellington Place / Wellington House / Hexagon House