Principal infrastructure engineer

Location: Croydon | Liverpool | Manchester | Sheffield (hybrid)

Salary: £76,117 (National) £80,237 (London) Plus skills allowance of up to £19483, pending assessment

Advert Close Date: 24th June

Job summary

Home Office Government Digital and Data designs, builds and develops services for the rest of the department and for government. Every year our systems support up to 3 million visa applications, checks on 100 million border crossings, up to 8 million passport applications and deliver 140 million police checks on people, vehicles, and property.

Networks and Infrastructure (N&I) within the Home Office are responsible for delivering and maintaining the core infrastructure for all the Home Office. This post sits within the existing Core Infrastructure team.

The team handles a diverse range of systems, concepts, and technologies. This includes Windows and Linux servers, core Windows technologies such as Active Directory, DNS, DHCP and Certificate Authority. They also manage server and service monitoring, Infrastructure as Code, immutable infrastructure, automation and serverless compute as well as public cloud provided services across several major public cloud vendors. The team collaborates extensively with other traditional infrastructure teams for connectivity and services as well as application teams to move legacy workloads to the cloud.

This post offers the opportunity for skilled, ambitious applicants to work with a range of these technologies to develop their skills and career in Infrastructure Engineering within a large enterprise environment.

A Principal Infrastructure Engineer is a technical leader, responsible for developing strategic and tactical engineering roadmaps for technologies and services, ensuring they are future proofed and maximise value of technology investments. You define engineering best practice within the Home Office and inspire others to adopt them.

You may be responsible for the operational relationships with suppliers, ensuring services and products are delivered and aligned to industry best practice, regulatory and contractual requirements.

Leading infrastructure teams, you oversee the building, managing, supporting, and maintaining solutions according to departmental policy and strategy. You will work with technical architects, ensuring continuous improvement to the service catalogue, future designs, and service operability. You will lead on overall management activities such as workforce planning, budgeting, technology roadmaps, projects, and tasks.

Like many organisations we need to maintain our services 24/7, therefore, on occasions there may be a requirement to work out of hours, for which you will be paid an additional allowance.

Main Responsibilities

• Leading teams and departments in the design, implementation, transition, administration and support of infrastructure solutions and services.
• Providing operational feedback to technical architects to ensure their designs are meeting the needs of the infrastructure engineers.
• Providing support to make sure that solutions and services are designed with security controls embedded, specifically engineered as mitigation against security threats.
• Ensuring that the right actions are taken to investigate, resolve and anticipate problems, coordinating teams to investigate problems, implement solutions and establish preventative measures.
• Establishing standards and procedures across a service lifecycle including the development lifecycle and ensure that engineers adhere to this. Managing resources to ensure that the systems integration function works effectively.
• Defining and helping shape engineering best practices and standards.
• Apply and continually develop strong technical expertise within computer science or a related computing field, keeping your knowledge current through ongoing professional development.
• The key engineering principles and standards, and the ability to inspire others to follow these.
• Managing and delivering complex technologies within time, cost and quality targets.
• Ensuring all solutions are robust, resilient and appropriately implemented, secured, tested and documented.
• Building strong partnerships with diverse teams across multiple locations and technologies.
• Advising on future technology changes and innovations and define best practice for network improvements and information security.
• Strong hands‑on technical knowledge of one or more of the following: identity and access management, cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS or Azure), public cloud networking.

Why work for us…

Find out more information at: Benefits - Home Office Careers, but some of the primary ones are:

• A Civil Service Pension with employer contribution rates of at least 28.97%.
• In‑year reward scheme for one‑off or sustained exceptional personal or team achievements.
• 25 days annual leave on appointment, rising with service.
• 8 days of public holidays, plus 1 additional privilege day.
• Where business needs allow, some roles may be suitable for a combination of office and home‑based working. This is a non‑contractual arrangement where all employees will be expected to spend a minimum of 60% of their working time in an office.