* Engineering Strategy and Standards: Co-Define with Strategy and Architecture team and champion the long-term technical vision and technology strategy for the department’s services and platforms, ensuring alignment with central government technology policies (e.g., cloud-first, open standards).* Work with Heads of (Architecture, Delivery, Testing, Product) to implement the digital strategy using best practices* Establish and enforce best practices in CI/CD, SRE, TDD, and secure coding (OWASP).* Modernisation: Drive the roadmap for retiring legacy systems (e.g., migration of legacy portals to an Integrated Procurement Platform) while managing technical debt.* Open Standards: Ensure all software is "Open by Default," promoting re-use across the Civil Service and alignment with the Technology Code of Practice.* Be the ultimate owner of engineering quality, setting robust standards for clean code, test-driven development (TDD), CI/CD, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices across all engineering teams.* Lead the development and modernisation of complex, large-scale systems, including integrating with legacy government systems* Ensure all software development meets the high standards of the Government Service Manual and passes all relevant Digital Service Assessments (Alpha, Beta, Live).* Build the Community: Act as the "Head of Profession" for software engineering, fostering a culture of continuous learning, psychological safety, and radical collaboration.* Capability Building: Lead recruitment, retention, and career development strategies. Define the "Definition of Done" and engineering excellence standards across all multidisciplinary teams. Establish and evolve the department’s DDaT (Digital, Data and Technology) Engineering Capability, defining clear career pathways, skills matrices, and professional development plans (including coaching and recruitment).* Mentorship: Coach Lead Developers and Senior Engineers, helping them grow into strategic technical leaders.* Line management and Activity management: Manage the development team of perm staff and Manage a balanced mix of civil service and third party resources, ensuring knowledge transfer, transition planning is built in technical delivery plans and building a sustainable in-house technical team.****Technical Depth:**** Proven experience in a senior engineering role (e.g., Head of Engineering, Lead Developer or Architect) building large-scale, distributed systems using modern languages (e.g., Java, Python, Node.js) and cloud infrastructure (AWS/Azure/Google) in UK Civil service or similar public sector environment.****Leadership:**** Experience managing "managers of managers" and leading large (20+ person) multidisciplinary engineering functions.****Strategic Vision:**** Ability to translate complex policy requirements into sustainable technical roadmaps.****Stakeholder Influence:**** Experience in communicating technical risks and trade-offs to non-technical senior leaders (Directors and Ministers).* Competitive salary* Generous pension scheme* A discretionary non-contractual performance related bonus* Working remotely in addition to working in advertised office location* Flexi time scheme (available for B1-B6) - Remove this bullet for SCS roles* Minimum 25 days annual leave to a maximum service related 30 days excluding bank holidaysArtificial 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 for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use*.*Crown Commercial Service (CCS) is the largest public procurement organisation in the UK. With over 800 staff, we help thousands of public and third sector buyers in the UK with billions of pounds of spending each year. We have a wide range of commercial agreements to help our customers buy what they need, when they need it - saving time and money.
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