Lead Systems Engineer | NHS England

NHS England; Brighton; On-site; GBP 50,000 - 70,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading health service organization in the UK is seeking a Lead Systems Engineer to lead multidisciplinary teams in delivering and operating complex systems. The role requires driving design decisions, improving engineering standards, and mentoring colleagues. Ideal candidates will have experience with complex applications and a commitment to high availability and quality software development. The position includes a 20% RRP payment and requires participation in a 24/7 on-call rota.

Benefits

20% Recruitment and Retention Premia payment

Opportunity for professional development

Participate in a collaborative work environment

Qualifications

• Demonstrable experience working on a complex application across technologies.
• Experience implementing quality-focused development practices.
• Ability to take a lead role in driving design decisions.

Responsibilities

• Develop, build and operate highly available distributed systems.
• Contribute to the NHS engineering principles.
• Take technical ownership across application and infrastructure.

Skills

Complex application across all layers of the stack

Quality-focused development practices

Technical ownership across system space

Engaging in peer-to-peer collaboration

Coaching and mentoring colleagues

Job description

About the Lead Systems Engineer

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

System Expectations

• 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.

Demographics Team Opportunity

We now have an exciting opportunity to join our Demographics team in Products and Platforms, which builds and operates a set of products including the Personal Demographics Service (PDS) and GP Registration.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop, build and operate national, highly available distributed systems that are built and run within NHS England.
• Operate within and contribute to the NHS England engineering principles.
• Take technical ownership across the system space, including application, environments, infrastructure and networks, pipelines and operational tools.
• Engage in peer‑to‑peer collaboration to solve engineering problems and drive‑up organisational engineering standards – a significant part of the Lead Systems Engineer role, estimated at 25% of time.
• Responsible for engineering maturity within the team.
• Coaching and mentoring colleagues to develop the team.

Candidate Experience & Skills

Candidates will need to demonstrate experience of the following:

• Working on a complex application across all layers of the stack including application, infrastructure, CI/CD, testing, monitoring and alerting.
• Implementing quality‑focused development practices and testing techniques.
• Taking a lead role, e.g., driving design decisions or managing stakeholders effectively.
• Driving and implementing improvements within a product or team.
• Working within a team to deliver software in a collaborative way.

Additional Information

Our work supports the NHS to deliver high‑quality services for patients and best value for taxpayers. Our staff bring expertise across hundreds of specialisms — including clinical, operational, commissioning, technology, data science, cyber security, software engineering, education, and commercial — enabling us to design and deliver high‑quality NHS services.

We lead the NHS in England by enabling local systems and providers to improve the health of their people and patients; making the NHS a great place to work; working collaboratively to ensure healthcare workforce have the right knowledge, skills, values and behaviours to deliver accessible, compassionate care; optimising the use of digital technology, research, and innovation; and delivering value for money.

The post of Lead Systems Engineer has been awarded a Recruitment and Retention Premia (RRP). In recognition of this, the role attracts an additional monthly RRP payment equal to 20% per annum. Please be aware that RRP is non‑contractual and subject to review.

Participation in a shared on‑call rota is required to support a 24/7/365 service. The rota covers evenings, weekends, and public holidays.

If successful at interview, an Inter Authority Transfer (IAT) via the Electronic Staff Record (ESR) will be initiated. 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 recruitment process.

This advert closes on Sunday 14 Dec 2025.