Lead Systems Engineer | NHS England

NHS England; Exeter; On-site; GBP 96,000 - 111,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

RRP payment 20%

Job summary

NHS England is seeking a Lead Systems Engineer to act as the technical lead for multidisciplinary teams delivering and operating critical national systems. You will own the system space across applications, environments, infrastructure and networks, driving improvements and mentoring colleagues.

The role requires experience with complex distributed architectures, CI/CD, monitoring and security controls, plus strong stakeholder collaboration to raise engineering maturity across the organisation.

Qualifications

• Experience working on a complex application across all stack layers including app, infra, CI/CD, testing and monitoring.
• Ability to drive design decisions, manage stakeholders effectively and provide technical leadership.
• Experience leading improvements within a product or team and coaching others.

Responsibilities

• Develop, build and operate national, highly available distributed systems.
• Take technical ownership across applications, environments, infrastructure and networks.
• Collaborate with peers to raise engineering standards across NHS England.

Skills

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Stakeholder management

CI/CD

Monitoring & alerting

Tools

Cloud platforms

Infrastructure as Code

Security controls

Job description

Salary: £95,878.08 - £111,409.92 per annum - includes a RRP payment of 20%

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.
• 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.

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.

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

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 effectivey, 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.

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 announcedthat 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 external candidates.

You can find further details about the role, including key responsibilities and accountabilities, alongside the organisational structure and person specification in the attached Job Description and other supporting documents.

The post of Lead System 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 non-contractual and subject to review.

This advert closes on Tuesday 17 Nov 2026

£79,898.40 - £92,841.60 per annum - includes a RRP payment of 20%