Site Reliability Engineer

Government Digital Service; Greater London, West of England, Manchester; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is looking for Site Reliability Engineers to join our cross‑disciplinary teams across London, Bristol and Manchester. You’ll build resilient, scalable services that power UK public digital services and operate at scale.

You’ll work with a mix of front‑end and back‑end developers, product managers and architects, to create secure, observable systems and maintain engineering excellence across government platforms.

Qualifications

• Proficient in at least one programming language (Java/TypeScript/Python) and modern development practices.
• Strong Git skills and experience with agile workflows.
• Experience building scalable, observable services in public sector or similar environments.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy and operate resilient, secure services at scale.
• Collaborate with front-end/back-end developers, product managers and architects.
• Implement infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines.
• Ensure monitoring, alerting and incident response are robust and timely.
• Support 2nd line and on-call rotations as needed.

Skills

Java

TypeScript

Python

Git

Agile

Observability

Cloud platforms (AWS)

Tools

Kubernetes

ECS

Terraform

CloudFormation

Github Actions

Linux

Job description

This role is available across our London, Bristol and Manchester locations

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is the digital centre of government. We are responsible for setting, leading and delivering the vision for a modern digital government.

Our priorities are to drive a modern digital government, by:

• joining up public sector services
• harnessing the power of AI for the public good
• strengthening and extending our digital and data public infrastructure
• elevating leadership and investing in talent
• funding for outcomes and procuring for growth and innovation
• committing to transparency and driving accountability

We are home to the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (I.AI), the world-leading GOV.UK and at the forefront of coordinating the UK’s geospatial strategy and activity. We lead the Government Digital and Data function and champion the work of digital teams across government.

We’re part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and employ more than 1,000 people all over the UK, with hubs in Manchester, London and Bristol.

The Government Digital Service is where talent translates into impact. From your first day, you’ll be working with some of the world’s most highly-skilled digital professionals, all contributing their knowledge to make change on a national scale.

Join us for rewarding work that makes a difference across the UK. You'll solve some of the nation’s highest-priority digital challenges, helping millions of people access services they need

Former DSIT recruitment campaigns are continuing as usual, but candidates should be aware that following the Government’s announcement on the changes to some civil service departments, roles will be subject to the machinery of government moves and will ultimately be in one of the new departments. We will provide more information if you are selected for a role. This work remains of high importance to the civil service, and we thank you for your continued interest.

Sometimes described as the most strategic programme in government, GOV.UK One Login represents a once in a career opportunity to work on a software product that will be used by the majority of the people living in the UK. It’s a fast paced, dynamic and challenging environment that is sure to offer you career satisfaction as well as a chance to develop and enhance your skills.

GOV.UK One Login is being designed and built for the many, not the few. It will unite services across government, revolutionising the way government departments interact digitally with users. One Login will deliver an accessible and essential function that will change lives and help millions.

GOV.UK Pay enables public sector organisations to take online and telephone card payments quickly and securely, while helping teams manage income, issue refunds and generate financial reports. Since its launch ten years ago, GOV.UK Pay has processed more than 150 million transactions worth over £10 billion for more than 600 organisations. The next few years present a significant opportunity to transform how payments are managed across the public sector.

GOV.UK Notify makes it simple for public sector organisations to send emails, text messages and letters to users. Since launching in 2016, the service has grown rapidly and is now used by more than 1,700 organisations and 12,500 services. GOV.UK Notify has delivered over 13.5 billion notifications and continues to send millions more each day. Its users span government departments, local authorities, NHS trusts, GP surgeries, emergency services and other public sector bodies. Notify supports a diverse range of use cases, including appointment confirmations and reminders, passport application updates, account security notifications, etc.

The National Data Library will be a single trusted gateway to curated, high-quality public sector data. We are transforming the government’s open data portal, data.gov.uk into the National Data Library to improve how we support problem solvers to use public data. We have an ambitious roadmapwith the goal to maximise the use of available data to make good decisions, build innovative services, learn and experiment.

If this sounds like the next role for you on your career journey then we’d love to hear from you.

SREs at GDS develop infrastructure and support application teams. This involves working with a diverse range of other technologists and non-technical stakeholders so communication and empathy are as important as technical capability.

We’re interested in people who want to:

• be part of one of our multidisciplinary service teams working with and supporting front-end and back-end developers, delivery and product managers, tech writers and architects
• build and maintain resilient, highly available and secure systems to meet the needs of our users
• take responsibility for solving complex and interesting problems
• create infrastructure as code to ensure our infrastructure and deployment pipelines are reusable, repeatable and reliable
• ensure our systems are appropriately monitored and instrumented to enable our teams to identify and respond to operational issues quickly and effectively
• build CI/CD pipelines to enable our developers to get their code into production as quickly and safely as possible
• act as a digital ambassador, sharing experiences through public speaking and blog posts
• participate in our in-hours 2nd line and out-of-hours support rotations to gain empathy for users and awareness of operational concerns
• share knowledge of tools and practices with your wider team and peers to drive consistency and maintain our high engineering standards

Person specification

We're interested in people who have:

• a high level of proficiency in at least one programming language (we use Java, Typescript, and Python), modern development standards, awareness of development process optimisation and strong Git skills
• a working knowledge of Agile best practices, the benefits of focusing on user needs and have used quantitative and qualitative data about users to turn user focus into outcomes
• a deep understanding of Linux operating system internals and are comfortable working with Linux virtual machines or containers, including the ability to identify, locate and fix service faults, capacity management and availability strategies
• strong experience of supporting large production services with infrastructure technologies including databases, web servers, DNS, CDNs, reverse proxies, message queues and load balancers. Systems design experience, working with well understood technology and identifying appropriate patterns. Have established design patterns and iterated them
• extensive experience of building and maintaining services in the cloud (preferably AWS), creating infrastructure as code using Terraform and CloudFormation, and using container orchestration systems like Kubernetes or ECS or serverless application design with AWS Lambda
• knowledge of setting up pipelines in a CI/CD tool like Github Actions or AWS Codepipeline, and will have built and tested simple interfaces between systems and worked on more complex integrations as part of a wider team
• a good understanding of information security principles and how to keep large operational services secure

Please note

This role requires SC clearance, which would normally need 5 years’ UK residency in the past 5 years. This is not an absolute requirement, but supplementary checks may be needed where individuals have not lived in the UK for that period. This may mean your security clearance (and therefore your appointment) will take longer or, in some cases, not be possible.

Sponsorship

DSIT cannot offer Visa sponsorship to candidates through this campaign. DSIT holds a Visa sponsorship licence but this can only be used for certain roles and this campaign does not qualify.