Senior Infrastructure Engineer

About the job

Job summary

Discover a career in your hands at HMRC. Whether you're seeking purpose, growth, or a workplace that gives you a true sense of belonging, hear from some of our employees as they share their story about what it's really like to work at HMRC.

Visit our YouTube channel to watch the full series and come and discover your potential.

HMRC is transforming the UK's tax system through cutting-edge digital innovation and the Chief Digital and Information Officer (CDIO) Group is at the heart of that mission.

We are building high-quality digital services that will enhance the customer experience, enable real-time interactions, and make tax simpler and more intuitive for everyone. By equipping our colleagues with modern tools and technologies, we are also reshaping how we work - allowing HMRC to focus its resources where they can deliver the greatest impact.

The Multi-channel Digital Tax Platform sits within the Chief Enterprise Platform Office and is the backbone of HMRC citizen facing services.

These roles will place you within a team with the mandate to provide, maintain and optimise a Platform as a Service (PaaS), with the objective to provide business areas in HMRC and other departments the means to create, maintain and iteratively improve the highest quality services in Government. We provide the digital delivery teams with everything they need for developing, deploying and improving their services, from the underlying cloud-based PaaS to the tools for collaborative working, performance analytics and live service support.

Job description

Purpose of the Role

- The Platform is built and operated by a number of specialist teams and you will be placed on an established team of DevOps practitioners. We consider DevOps to encompass an approach to work that combines the ability to test, write and review code, alongside the capacity to troubleshoot operational problems in the cloud technologies we use. This becomes extremely effective when operating in agile teams, collaborating to achieve continuous delivery using open source software.

- All coding work will be done as part of a programming pair, and you must be adept at collaborating with others. All code will be stored with distributed source control, allowing wide collaboration across the department and beyond. The tools we use for metrics, logging and alerting, as well as configuration management and continuous integration are all open source, and you will need to be experienced at using these common tools, as well as investigating and quickly mastering new options as the PaaS continues to iterate and evolve.

Reporting Line

- You will have a Civil Servant Line Manager, but your daily work will be managed by your Team's Product Owner and Delivery Lead (who will likely be a mix of Civil Servants and Contractors).

- You may also be required to Line Manage junior colleagues (O and/or HO level).

Person specification

Key responsibilities

- Maintain design and troubleshooting documentation.

- Improve the reliability of the platform.

- Build, maintain and continually improve the tools that we use to deploy and operate the software that we build. This includes automated build and deployment, secrets management, system observability, monitoring, log aggregation, scaling, and more.

- Develop tools and services useful in DevOps environments such as performance monitoring, security monitoring, deployment/configuration, continuous integration/build servers and cloud resource creation scripts.

- Contribute towards the ongoing development of junior colleagues.

- Seeking out opportunities to transfer knowledge from experienced developers.

Essential Criteria

- Experience operating on large scale government platform with multiple agents.

- Confident with programming languages and IaC (Infrastructure as code), and 3 years of experience of programming in Python and Terraform.

- Comfortable coding with distributed source control, such as Git.

- Solid understanding of agile development, Continuous Integration, Test Driven Development and version control.

- Developing on cloud-based environments like AWS.

- Experience leading a pair/mentoring junior engineers.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Working Together
• Changing and Improving
• Developing Self and Others

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• The interview will include a technical exercise with a lead engineer.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £45,544, HM Revenue and Customs contributes £13,194 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

HMRC operates both Flexible and Hybrid Working policies, allowing you to balance your work and personal commitments. We welcome applications from those who need to work a more flexible arrangement and will agree to requests where possible, considering our operational and customer service needs.

We offer a generous leave allowance, starting at 25 days and increasing by a day for every year of qualifying service up to a maximum of 30 days.

• Pension - We make contributions to our colleagues' Alpha pension equal to at least 28.97% of their salary.
• Family friendly policies.
• Personal support.
• Coaching and development.

To find out more about HMRC benefits and find out what it's really like to work for HMRC hear from our insiders or visit Thinking of joining the Civil Service

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours, Experience and Technical skills.

How to Apply

As part of the application process, you will be asked to provide the following:

• A name-blind CV including your job history and previous experiences. Your CV should cover up to your last 3 roles, detailing your responsibilities and key achievements (max 100 words per role).
• A 750-word Personal Statement. Your Personal Statement should clearly demonstrate how your skills and experience meet the essential criteria.

Further details around what this will entail are listed on the application form.

Sift

In the event of a large number of applications being received, an initial sift may be held on your CV.

At full sift your CV and Personal Statement will be assessed, with the successful candidates being invited to interview.

We may also raise the score required at any stage of the process if we receive a high number of applications.

Interview

The interview will be 45 minutes in duration and will be held by a 3-person panel. The interview will include a technical exercise with a lead engineer.

During the panel interview, you will be assessed against behavioural success profiles, outlined below. You will be asked one question per behaviour to assess your suitability against the role.

Interviews will take place via video link. Sift and interview dates to be confirmed.

Eligibility

Please take extra care to tick the correct boxes in the eligibility sections of your application form. Mistakes sometimes happen but if you contact us later than two working days (Monday-Friday) before the vacancy closes, we may not be able to reopen your application for you. If you do make a mistake with your eligibility form, or have withdrawn yourself in error and need your application reinstated whilst the campaign is still live, please contact us via: - Use the subject line to insert appropriate wording for example - 'Please re-open my application - insert vacancy ref & vacancy closing date insert date '.

To check that you are eligible to apply for this role, please review the eligibility information before submitting your application.

Exceptionally, candidates who are not successful at this grade may be considered for appointment to similar roles at a lower grade where the eligibility criteria are met. If this applies, we will contact you directly.

Sponsorship

We have assessed this role against both Home Office and HMRC criteria and we are unable to offer sponsorship for a Skilled Worker Visa. This means the vacancy is not open to applicants who require visa sponsorship.

The HMRC app can help you with your application

The HMRC app can provide you with your past 5 years' employment history, making the process of filling in your application quicker and easier.

If successful in your application, you will need your National Insurance number for the onboarding process.

Download the HMRC app now and save your National Insurance number to your digital phone wallet.

. click apply for full job details