HM Courts and Tribunals Service

Directorate: Digital Technology Services (DTS)

Pay Band: G7

Job Title: 2x Senior DevOps Engineer

Location: National

Successful applicants will be expected to be office based 3 days per week in any HMCTS Office (subject to business availability).

Term: Permanent

Interview: Video conference via Teams

Level of Clearance - To apply for this role, you will be required to successfully complete Security Clearance (SC) level as a condition of appointment: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/united-kingdom-security-vetting-clearance-levels/sc-guidance-pack-for-applicants  

Important salary details:

New recruits to the Civil Service joining MoJ are expected to join at the band minimum.

Existing Civil Servants applying on promotion, will usually be appointed on the salary minimum of the new pay band, or receive an increase of 10 percent on the current base salary, whichever is higher (This is restricted to the pay maximum of the new band).

Government Digital and Data (GDD) Profession Capability Framework and Success Profiles Frameworks. Using GDD we will then determine if you will be paid an additional allowance, on top of your basic salary.  This role is aligned to the Technical Job Family, is a Development Operations (DevOps) engineer role at Senior DevOps engineer level, but carries the title Senior DevOps Engineer within DTS.

Introduction:

These are exciting times at HM Court and Tribunals Service (HMCTS). As an agency of the MoJ, we support the judiciary across England and Wales to deliver justice by running courts and tribunals and processing outcomes, and we are looking for talented people to help us achieve our ambitions. It will be challenging, important and rewarding.

HMCTS Digital and Technology Services (DTS) is a specialist technology directorate which provides support to HMCTS in the use of IT and Digital.

DTS is committed to being a great place to work and part of our offer is brilliant training opportunities and support from expert colleagues. As well as that you’ll find flexible working, an inclusive culture and a place where your opinion is valued.

Please follow the link below for further information about HMCTS. www.gov.uk/government/organisations/hm-courts-and-tribunals-service

Job Description:

As a Senior DevOps Engineer at HMCTS you will work with a wide range of stakeholders such as user researchers, product managers, designers, business analysts, delivery managers and digital architects, all of whom share a vision for making better government through smarter use of technology. You will innovate to radically transform public services for the better.

You will be responsible for maintaining and evolving our Wowza and Camunda instances in our Production environment as well as working with our Software Development teams to help improve our DevOps practices.

Examples of our other products can be found in our GitHub repository:

• https://github.com/hmcts

You can find more information about our ways of working in the HMCTS Way: https://hmcts.github.io

Technologies we rely heavily on:

• Java and Spring Boot to write our backend services

• Node.js to write our frontend services

• Power Platform for low-code development

• Jenkins for CI/CD

• Dynatrace for application monitoring

• Kubernetes and Docker to run our services

• Azure for most of our infrastructure

• Terraform for infrastructure as code

• Postgres and Redis as our databases.

• GOV.UK Design System for our web interfaces

• Macs to do all the above

• In addition, we use a range of other technologies and continue to evolve by employing new technologies that help us deliver better services to our user

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, build, maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment tooling and engineering standards across services and platforms.

• Transform technical requirements into effective DevOps tooling and processes that enable safe, fast and reliable product delivery.

• Ensure deployment strategies are repeatable, scalable, resilient and highly available across multiple environments.

• Automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration and operational tasks using infrastructure as code and scripting.

• Support and maintain live services, including incident response, troubleshooting, root cause analysis and problem management.

• Provide deep technical support to delivery teams, identify bottlenecks and solve complex operational problems.

• Implement and improve observability, including monitoring, alerting, logging, dashboards and service health checks.

• Apply security best practice across the delivery lifecycle, including secrets management, patching, vulnerability management and secure by design approaches.

• Manage service availability, performance and capacity in a way that is effective, measurable and cost conscious.

• Coach and mentor junior colleagues, promote knowledge sharing and support the development of DevOps capability across the organisation.

• Participate in recruitment, procurement and supplier engagement where required.

• Support planned and occasional urgent out-of-hours work for releases, pipeline updates, smoke testing, incidents and essential maintenance.

Essential Criteria:

• Strong experience designing and operating cloud native platforms and deployment pipelines in enterprise environments.

• Hands on expertise with infrastructure as code and automation tooling, for example Terraform and scripting languages such as Bash, Python or Groovy.

• Experience with containerisation and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.

• Strong understanding of CI/CD practices, source control, build tooling and release automation.

• Experience of supporting and improving live services, including incident management, service support, monitoring and operational troubleshooting.

• Knowledge of platform security, including identity and access management, secrets management, vulnerability mitigation and secure engineering practices.

• Ability to design scalable, resilient and supportable solutions, with an understanding of networking, certificates, APIs and systems integration.

Desirable

• Experience supporting media/video streaming platforms such as Wowza and/or workflow or orchestration platforms such as Camunda.

Working pattern and out-of-hours support

This role supports live digital services and deployment pipelines. Candidates should be aware that the role requires some flexible working outside standard office hours.

This includes supporting pipeline updates outside normal working hours and completing checks to confirm services have not been affected, Monday to Friday. Where an issue is found during the 8am smoke test, the expectation is that it is investigated and corrected as soon as possible, with the aim of restoring service before 9am.

Where both roles are in post, cover will be required across the core working day of 8am to 5pm, Monday to Friday. Major Wowza image upgrades can only take place after 7pm during the working week.

Application process:

Coding Task 

When submitting your application please complete the following coding task and provide a link to the repository: 

https://github.com/hmcts/dts-devops-challenge

Please note the Civil Service application process is name-blind, so ensure that the repository containing your code does not include any personal information that would identify you. 

The following areas of the Success Profile Framework will be used to assess and score your application during the sift, and interview. 

Experience - As demonstrated in your application form. 

Technical - Coding task and interview. If successful, you will move on to the interview stage, which will include an extension exercise to the coding task you submit in your Personal Statement 

During the interview, you will be assessed against the Government Digital and Data (GDD) Capability Framework. 

• Capability Skill 1 - Programming and Build 

• Capability Skill 2 - Systems integration 

• Capability Skill 3 - Service support 

• Capability Skill 4 - Information security 

• Capability Skill 5 - Systems design 

Coding task - You will be required to present your solution during the interview and there will be an extension exercise you will also be asked to do. 

Behaviours - You will be required to provide evidence of the following key behaviours at G7 Level. 

• Leadership

• Delivering at Pace

Reserve List:

HMCTS run a Reserve List, where candidates who are unsuccessful at interview by only a few points, can be offered other roles, at the same band, for up to 12 months. You will be able to view your status via the application screen. If you have been added to the Reserve List, your status will show either Merit or Reserve list.