Lead Systems Engineer

Job overview

A Lead Systems Engineer is typically the technical lead for multidisciplinary teams delivering and operating multiple components within a system.

We work on national, highly available distributed systems built and run by in house teams. These systems can differ in size, scale and purpose, but an example system would:

• Have a round-the-clock requirement to be available to a level of 99.9% or higher
• Have a national-scale impact on unavailability, and cope with the load associated with a daily transactional user-base of more than one hundred thousand people
• Adopt modern Cloud best-practices and open standards to support interoperability and re-usability
• Achieve high availability through operational simplicity.
• Provide flexible low-cost horizontal scale out to handle expected and unexpected variations in load.
• Handle the architectural trade-offs necessary to avoid logical bottlenecks
• Provide security controls appropriate for the storage of large volumes of sensitive data - hundreds of millions of records and documents.
• Have a direct clinical impact on patient care.

These national critical systems enable safe, reliable identification across health and care, supporting services used by hundreds of thousands of people every day.

We have an exciting opportunity to join multidisciplinary product teams in Products and Platforms across a range of national services.

Main duties of the job

As a Lead Systems Engineer, you will:

• Develop, build and operate national, highly available distributed systems within NHS England.
• Work within and contribute to NHS England engineering principles.
• Take technical ownership across the system space, including applications, environments, infrastructure and networks, pipelines, and operational tools.
• Collaborate with peers to solve engineering problems and raise engineering standards across the organisation. This is a significant part of the Lead Systems Engineer role, in the order of 25% of time.
• Drive engineering maturity within the team.
• Coach and mentor colleagues to support team development.

Candidates will need to demonstrate experience of the following

• Experience working on a complex application across all layers of the stack including application, infrastructure, CI/CD, testing, monitoring and alerting etc.
• Implementing quality-focused development practices and testing techniques
• Experience of taking a lead role, for example driving design decisions, managing stakeholders effectively, and providing technical leadership.
• Experience of driving and implementing improvements within a product or team.
• Working within a team to deliver software in a collaborative way, including coaching and mentoring colleagues to develop the team and contribute to a strong engineering culture.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

The post of Lead Systems Engineer has been awarded a Recruitment and Retention Premia (RRP) in response to current labour market conditions. In recognition of this, the role attracts an additional monthly RRP payment equal to 20% per annum.

Please be aware that RRP is none contractual and subject to review.

On-call

Participation in a shared on-call rota may be required to support a 24/7/365 service, this rota covers evenings, weekends, and public holidays.

Security Clearance

Successful candidates may need to meet the requirements for Security Check (SC) clearance to access live systems and sensitive data.

You can find further details about the role, including key responsibilities and accountabilities, and person specification in the attached Job Description.

Applicant requirements

This post will require a submission for Disclosure to be made to check for any unspent criminal convictions.