Senior Platform Engineer

Inspire People; Tees Valley; Hybrid; GBP 63,000 - 84,000; Full time

Job summary

A government department in the UK is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to enhance its AWS global product platform. The role includes providing development teams with essential tools, participating in CI/CD processes, and impacting digital service delivery across government. Ideal candidates should have cloud experience, programming skills, and knowledge of infrastructure best practices. This position offers a competitive salary between £63,824 - £83,778 depending on location, along with excellent benefits and flexible working options.

Benefits

Civil Service pension scheme with 28.97% employer contribution

Flexible working options

Best-in-class training and development

Qualifications

• Experience building code-defined, reliable, and tested infrastructure.
• Ability to improve Developer Experience through platform changes.
• Experience with Agile methodologies.

Responsibilities

• Provide development teams with tools for application monitoring and CI/CD.
• Scale and enhance the AWS global product platform.
• Participate in an on-call rota for additional pay.

Skills

Cloud experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) skills

Fluency in programming languages (Python/Django/Java)

Knowledge of Linux/Unix fundamentals

Understanding of TCP/IP networking

Agile project experience

Tools

Terraform

AWS CodePipelines

Elastic Container Service

PostgreSQL

Job description

Join a team at the heart of the global economy! The Department for Business and Trade ("DBT") bring an exciting opportunity for Senior Platform Engineers to work on critical platforms that support how digital services are built and operated across the organisation. You will contribute to scaling a major AWS global product platform and provide development teams with the tools they need to build, deploy and operate services effectively. £63,824 - £83,778 (dependant on location) plus 29% pension contribution and other excellent Civil Service benefits. Flexible, hybrid working from 7 UK locations.

About DBT

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) is the department for economic growth. The Government Digital and Data (GDaD) directorate develops and operates tools and services to support businesses to invest, grow and export, creating jobs and opportunities across the country.

Aout role

DBA have now successfully completed the migration of DBT services from GOV.UK PaaS to a new developer platform in AWS. Now, they're entering the next phase: evolving this platform into a full Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering.

Are you ready to help shape the future of digital delivery at DBT?

We're looking for Platform Engineers to help DBT build the most performant, secure and feature-rich hosting environment possible, one that puts developer experience front and centre. This is your chance to be part of something transformative, where your work will directly impact how digital services are built and run across government.

If you would like to find out more about the role, the Platform Engineering team and what it's like to work at DBT, we are holding a Hiring Manager Q&A session for this role where you can virtually 'meet the team' on Tuesday 17th February at 12:30pm.

Follow application page for instructions to book your virtual seat.

Responsibilities

As a Senior Platform Engineer, you will work to give development teams the tools for their job, including application performance monitoring, exception, log and metrics aggregation, dashboards, and declarative CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) pipelines.

You’ll evangelise product teams about service-level indicators, objectives, and error budgets, and negotiate them. You’ll help build and scale our global product platform and participate in an on-call rota for which you will receive an additional allowance.

Specific projects the team are working on include rolling out an observability tool to enhance system monitoring and incident response, streamlining deployment processes to reduce downtime and speed up feature delivery, and developing a CLI tool to automate tasks and boost developer productivity.

Tech stack includes

• Amazon Web Services
• Azure
• AWS CodePipelines and AWS CodeBuild
• Terraform & AWS Copilot (CloudFormation)
• Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
• ElasticSearch/OpenSearch
• Python and Django framework
• PostgreSQL as a service (Amazon RDS)
• Sentry
• Redis/Elasticache

Essential experience

• Cloud experience with either Amazon Web Services, Azure or Google Cloud
• Ability to build code-defined, reliable and well tested infrastructure on top of cloud computing systems - IaC (e.g. Terraform, AWS Copilot, CloudFormation, Pulumi)
• Experience and fluency in one or more programming languages to write clean and effective code (e.g. Python/Django/Java)
• Knowledge of Linux/Unix fundamentals and TCP/IP networking
• Ability to see user impact in the infrastructure and platform changes, including a drive to improve the Developer Experience at every turn
• Exposure to code testing / knowledge of TDD
• Experience working in an Agile environment and designing solutions to complex technical problems independently

Desirable experience

• Experience in designing and implementing Docker images through containerisation
• Experience in prototyping through reuse of existing Open-Source components

Benefits

In return, you can expect a planned, transparent progression with learning and development tailored to your role, an environment with flexible working options and a culture encouraging inclusion and diversity, plus the following benefits:

• An excellent Civil Service pension scheme starting at 28.97% employer contribution
• Flexible, hybrid working from London, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, Belfast, Birmingham & Salford including options for condensed hours. Minimum 40% office based.
• Best-in-class training and development tailored to your role with study days and certifications expensed
• Annual leave starting at 26 days per annum plus statutory bank holidays rising to 33 days with service

Salary

Salary is dependent on location and technical skills as assessed at interview.

London based range: £67,575 to £83,778

National range: £63,824 to £80,158

Further information

• Apply at your earliest convenience, no later than 12pm (noon) 23rd February.
• This role requires you to undergo SC clearance where the requirement is to have been present in the UK for at least 3 of the last 5 years.
• DBT does not hold a UK Visa & Immigration (UKVI) Skilled Worker License sponsor and are unable to sponsor any individuals for Skilled Worker Sponsorship.

If you are an experienced Platform or a DevOps Engineer with the ability to build reliable and well tested infrastructure on top of cloud computing systems and looking to impact a function that will make a real difference to the UK economy, then apply today or contact Zymante Gintalaite (Zee) at Inspire People in complete confidence for further information.