Senior Lead Systems Engineer | National Distributed Systems

Cardiff and Vale University Health Board; Leeds; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

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Job summary

NHS England is seeking a Lead Systems Engineer to lead multidisciplinary teams delivering and operating national, highly available distributed systems. You will own architectural decisions across applications, environments, infrastructure and pipelines, and mentor colleagues to raise engineering standards.

Join a national-facing team where collaboration, on-call readiness, and adherence to engineering principles drive reliable services with wide public impact.

Qualifications

• Masters degree in a relevant subject or equivalent experience.
• Experience across all layers of the stack including application, infrastructure, CI/CD, testing, monitoring and alerting.
• Experience taking a lead role, driving design decisions, managing stakeholders effectively, and providing technical leadership.
• Experience driving and implementing improvements within a product or team.
• Experience of working in a team to deliver software in a collaborative way, including coaching and mentoring colleagues.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Drive engineering maturity within the team.
• Coach and mentor colleagues to support team development.
• On-call participation in a shared on-call rota may be required to support a 24/7/365 service.

Skills

Technical leadership

Stakeholder management

Mentoring

Quality-focused development

Education

Master's degree in a relevant subject

Equivalent experience

Tools

CI/CD

Monitoring & alerting

Security considerations

Job description

NHS England is seeking a Lead Systems Engineer to lead multidisciplinary teams delivering and operating national, highly available distributed systems. You will own architectural decisions across applications, environments, infrastructure and pipelines, and mentor colleagues to raise engineering standards.

Join a national-facing team where collaboration, on-call readiness, and adherence to engineering principles drive reliable services with wide public impact.