Lead Infrastructure Engineer (Cloud Automation)

This is an exciting opportunity in our Digital and Technology (DaT) team. We are looking for an enthusiastic Lead Infrastructure Engineer (Cloud Automation) with great leadership and technical skills and a drive to improve. This role is a unique opportunity as you will be part of a team delivering Platform Infrastructure and systems to the highest standards and implementing the DevOps culture and principles across the business.

The nature of this post may occasionally require you to do overtime during the week and at weekends. There may also be a requirement to take part in an on-call rota providing cover to ensure the services always remain operational.

Most of our Digital workforce are currently working from home or in a hybrid approach and this will also apply to this role. The office base for this role will be our Cardiff Head Office as this is where most of the team are based. As decisions are made regarding hybrid working, successful candidates will be expected to attend the office on occasion. For those candidates who live further afield and not within a commutable distance, we will consider remote working. This can be discussed in more detail with the line manager.

Companies House offers a flexible and welcoming culture that promotes a healthy work life balance as well as a proactive approach to wellbeing that allows us to be our best at work. We recognise that people are the key to our success so offer a fantastic benefits package including flexible working with no core hours, 30 days annual leave, 8 bank holidays and 1 privilege day as well as enrolment into the Civil Service Pension scheme with a contribution rate averaging 28%.

To find out more about what a great place Companies House is to work visit Companies House

Job description

The position will be focussed on building and maintaining Platform Infrastructure to enable the organisation to deliver rapidly and reliably deploy and innovate for our customers. A Lead Infrastructure Engineer (Cloud Automation) will keep our best practice guides updated and ensure these are adhered to across the whole organisation. The role requires the candidate to lead on various streams of work and provide technical support to Infrastructure engineers across the organisation.

You may be required to undertake line management responsibilities in this position, this will be discussed with the successful candidate. Previous management experience is desired but not essential as training can be provided.

Key Skills for Lead Infrastructure Engineers (Cloud Automation)

• Coding and scripting. You can interact with and read code.
• IT infrastructure. You can lead teams and departments in the design, implementation, administration and support of infrastructure solutions and services.
• Information security. You can understand information security. Design solutions and services with security controls embedded, specifically engineered with mitigation of security threats as a core feature.
• Modern standards approach. You can demonstrate a strong understanding of the most appropriate modern standards and practices, and how they are applied. Coach and guide others in these standards.
• Ownership and initiative. You can take accountability for issues that occur and be proactive in searching for potential problems. Achieve excellent user outcomes.
• Problem management. You can initiate and monitor actions to investigate patterns and trends to resolve problems. Effectively consult specialists where required. Determine the appropriate remedy and assist with its implementation. Determine preventative measures.
• Service focus. You can take inputs and establish coherent frameworks that work.
• Systems design. You can design systems characterised by medium levels of risk, impact, and business or technical complexity. Select appropriate design standards, methods and tools, and ensure they are applied effectively. Review the systems designs of others to ensure the selection of appropriate technology, efficient use of resources and integration of multiple systems and technology.
• Systems integration. You can establish standards and procedures across a service product life cycle, including the development product life cycle, and can ensure that practitioners adhere to these. Manage resources to ensure that the systems integration function works effectively
• Technical understanding. You can anticipate and advise on future technology changes that present opportunities for the product or programme.
• Testing. You can manage the planning of system and acceptance tests, co-ordinating both functional and non-functional specifications. Provide authoritative advice and guidance on test planning. Identify process improvements and contribute to the definition of best practice
• Troubleshooting and problem resolution. You can use lateral thinking to break a problem down into its component parts to identify and diagnose root causes. Troubleshoot and identify problems across different technology capabilities including computing, storage, networking, physical infrastructure, software, commercial-off-the-shelf software (COTS) and open source software.

Responsibilities

You'll be responsible for delivering the infrastructure and tooling to support a continuous delivery approach within Companies House.

You'll be user and service focused ensuring that value is delivered through improvement and automation of platform services.

Working in a team of infrastructure specialists and engineers, a lead infrastructure engineer builds, administers, supports, and maintains solutions as directed and according to departmental policy. Most of the time will be spent working with the delivery teams on carrying out the infrastructure work on development projects. This will include answering any queries regarding environment, configuration, and CI/CD processes.

At this role level, you will:

• Ensure services are integrated, delivered, and operated as required.
• Work with technical architects to translate architectural designs into operations.
• Design and develop infrastructure as code, source code repositories and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery pipelines to execute change on Cloud environments.
• Coordinate opportunities for integration between technologies to meet our organisational milestones using Cloud-based tooling to create reports and management information.
• Lead and support colleagues in non-functional requirements, ensuring availability, security, capacity, and performance for the platform and/or service.
• Transform technical requirements into an effective DevOps toolchain to enable product delivery.
• Ensure that deployment strategies for products are repeatable, scalable, and highly available.
• Have deep technical knowledge, providing support to delivery teams and solving complex problems.
• Ensure best practice guides are maintained and adhered to.

Person specification

We're looking for the following experience, which will be assessed at sift, technical stage and interview. Please refer to the bullet points below when writing your personal statement.

Experience and key skills required:

• Expert level of skill is required for this role – AWS Cloud technology, CI/CD tooling (such as Concourse, Jenkins etc), GitHub (source control and versioning), Terraform and Unix/Linux.
• A Practitioner level of skill demonstrates you use these skills daily and have a vast experience and examples of these – Ansible, Docker and Python.
• Working knowledge of the following is desired – Packer, Microservice and Serverless Architecture.
• Awareness of the following skills is desirable – Programming Languages (Java and NodeJS).

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £38,000, Companies House contributes £11,008 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

Head to Our benefits - Working for us - Recruitment (companieshouse.gov.uk) to find out more about the fantastic benefits package we have at Companies House.

Successful candidates must pass a Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS) check before they can be appointed. BPSS is an entry level security check. It uses the Police National Computer (PNC) to make sure a candidate has no convictions. The check returns evidence of any current criminal record and un-spent convictions under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974.

Successful candidates must meet the security requirements for Security Check (SC) before they can be appointed. To gain SC clearance you will normally need to have been a UK resident for a minimum of 5 years and will need to successfully complete all stages of the vetting process. More information can be found at National security vetting: clearance levels - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Nationality statement

Candidates will be subject to UK immigration requirements as well as Civil Service nationality rules. If you're applying for a role requiring security clearance, please be aware that foreign or dual nationality is not an automatic bar. However certain posts may have restrictions which could affect those who do not have sole British nationality or who have personal connections with certain countries outside the UK.

What will the process look like?

Stage 1 – Sifting process

Stage 2 - Technical Assessment

Stage 3 – Interview Assessment

Next Steps

Click 'Apply Now' to be taken to our main advert Civil Service Jobs where you can see more details regarding the role, the incredible benefits we have to offer and what it's like to work in Companies House.

This role closes on 3 July 2024.