Principal Systems Engineer

Job overview

Principal Systems Engineers provide technical leadership and are responsible for the operation and running of national, highly available distributed systems being built and run within NHS England.

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.

Main duties of the job

As a Principal Systems Engineer, you will focus on:

hands-on engineering and technical leadership for national, highly available distributed systems being built and run within NHS England, driving up the engineering maturity for those systems leading and contributing to broader engineering improvement initiatives across the directorate / organisation, and the ongoing refinement of the NHS England engineering principles.

You will also:

• represent System Engineering practice at a senior level within your business area, providing strong, decisive and visible technical leadership.
• act as an initial point of escalation for key technical issues, providing leadership, autonomy, support and direction.
• support Lead and Senior Systems Engineers to ensure every product or service has a clear technical vision with objectives aligned to the real needs of users and the mission of the organisation.
• ensure that relevant key stakeholders and delivery partners are included, work with them is well coordinated and that new partnership opportunities are evaluated.
• form part of a multi-functional leadership team to deliver user driven outcomes.

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

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

You can find further details about the role, including key responsibilities and accountabilities, alongside the organisational structure and person specification in the attached Job Description and other supporting documents.

The post of Principal 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 25% per annum.

Please be aware that RRP is non-contractual and subject to review.

If you like what you have read and think you have the skills and experience we need, then don't delay apply today! We get lots of applications for our roles and sometimes have to close our posts early. Don't miss out!

Applicant requirements

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