As a Principal Infrastructure Engineer, you will take on a technical leadership role within the Contact Engagement Platform (CEP), supporting multiple delivery teams within a complex, multi‑supplier environment. Your responsibilities will span strategy, governance, and day‑to‑day operational excellence, ensuring the infrastructure underpinning our services is secure, scalable, resilient, and cost‑effective.
Responsibilities
* Reporting to the Deputy Director for Contact Engagement Platform (CEP), set the strategic direction for your team(s), ensuring that platforms and services underpinning CEP are secure, reliable, scalable, and cost‑effective.
* Own and define the infrastructure and platform engineering strategy for your service delivery teams within CEP, embedding modern agile, DevOps, and cloud engineering practices alongside robust assurance and governance processes.
* Identify opportunities for HMRC to enhance its approach to infrastructure delivery, collaborating with other Heads of Infrastructure and Engineering across government and staying aware of emerging technologies and industry trends.
* Ensure the organisation continues to adopt innovative, efficient, and sustainable technologies that deliver measurable value for money for the taxpayer.
* Champion modern infrastructure engineering practices within CDIO, demonstrating how automation, observability and self‑service can be implemented safely and effectively, and promoting a culture where teams deploy and manage infrastructure changes frequently and confidently.
* Ensure that infrastructure roles within CEP are aligned with the Government Digital and Data Capability Framework, overseeing the development of career pathways, learning opportunities, and apprenticeship programmes.
* Work in close partnership with other Heads of Profession and Practice (e.g. Service Validation and Test, Architecture, Cyber Security) to ensure the infrastructure engineering strategy is coherent, integrated and aligned to wider objectives of Our Future CDIO and HMRC’s long‑term digital transformation goals.
* Support multiple delivery teams within a multi‑supplier environment, defining expected outcomes for teams (e.g. through statements of work) and working with suppliers and senior stakeholders to remediate issues.
* Place user needs first, championing the value of prototyping, user research and performance analytics to understand how users perceive and interact with services.
* Support teams by removing platform blockers, enabling them to deliver as fast as possible.
* Promote and support an agile approach to infrastructure engineering delivery within a large‑scale, multiple‑delivery group environment, emphasising principles such as the value of internal developer platforms and pattern libraries.
* Take responsibility for operating platform services in a live environment and support the live‑incident process, ensuring investigations, stakeholder communication and post‑incident analysis are conducted to reduce recurrence risk.
* Improve internal capability and reduce reliance on suppliers for technical roles by identifying or developing appropriate training programmes and establishing apprenticeship, industrial placement or work‑experience schemes.
* Establish and enforce appropriate “guard rails” around how teams deploy services in a cloud environment, through processes or tooling to ensure adherence to organisational standards and policies.
* Have a strong understanding of potential security controls for internal and external facing web services and their supporting platform capabilities, agreeing controls with security teams and ensuring correct implementation.
* Provide advice and guidance to senior stakeholders around the implications of technical decisions and ways of working, based on deep understanding of relevant technical concepts.
* Contribute to the wider technical/profession communities within a large organisation, sharing experience and expertise with other areas to improve organisational capability.
Qualifications
* Significant experience building and operating large‑scale services in a cloud‑first development environment, preferably AWS.
* Proven agile practitioner with experience delivering continuous delivery, automation and proactive monitoring.
* Strong understanding of security controls for internal and external facing web services, and experience agreeing and implementing appropriate controls.
* Excellent communication skills and ability to influence senior stakeholders.
#J-18808-Ljbffr