Manchester Digital
Mid and Senior Site Reliability Engineer (Platform Engineering/Identity/Azure)
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Job Summary
The Government Digital Service (GDS) is the digital centre of government. We are responsible for setting, leading and delivering the vision for a modern digital government.
Our priorities are to drive a modern digital government, by:
- joining up public sector services
- harnessing the power of AI for the public good
- strengthening and extending our digital and data public infrastructure
- elevating leadership and investing in talent
- funding for outcomes and procuring for growth and innovation
- committing to transparency and driving accountability
We are home to the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (I.AI), the world-leading GOV.UK and at the forefront of coordinating the UK’s geospatial strategy and activity. We lead the Government Digital and Data function and champion the work of digital teams across government.
We’re part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and employ more than 1,000 people all over the UK, with hubs in Manchester, London and Bristol.
The Government Digital Service is where talent translates into impact. From your first day, you’ll be working with some of the world’s most highly-skilled digital professionals, all contributing their knowledge to make change on a national scale.
Join us for rewarding work that makes a difference across the UK. You'll solve some of the nation’s highest-priority digital challenges, helping millions of people access services they need.
About Engineering Enablement
Part of the newly formed Platform Engineering, Resilience and Cyber directorate, the Engineering Enablement programme is boosting efficiency, strengthening security, and improving developer experience by providing infrastructure, tools and standards. We've been working for some time to manage our AWS estate and establish a robust privileged access management system for our most sensitive engineering access, based on Microsoft Entra.
Two roles (one Senior, one Mid) will go to our Engineering Access team. This team is rolling out a Privileged Access Management system based on Microsoft Entra across all GDS production services. The goal is a robust system fully integrated across GDS's engineering estate, reducing TOIL and human error associated with manual access management, and ensuring engineering productivity.
The third role (Senior) will go to our Cloud Platform team. The cloud platform team currently own and operate our AWS estate, and over the next 6-9 months will take over operational responsibility for the Azure Landing zone developed as part of the Engineering Access work. Your role will be to provide Azure experience and expertise to support the team in this journey.
Job Description
As an Site Reliability Engineer (Platform/Identity/Azure) you will:
- be part of a multidisciplinary team implementing and supporting our Azure cloud platform or Entra ID identity and access management system
- write infrastructure as code using terraform to ensure our infrastructure is consistent, reusable and reliable
- deploy and configure observability tools to enable our teams to identify and respond to operational issues quickly and effectively
- build CI/CD pipelines to enable the team to get code into production quickly and reliably
- provide day-to-day support for our platforms and tools to ensure they remain available, secure and robust
- participate in on-call rotations when necessary
- solve complex and interesting problems
- share your knowledge and expertise with your peers and the wider team to drive consistency and develop a culture of openness and learning
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In addition to the above, as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you will:
- line manage 1-2 technologists, supporting their growth and development
- provide technical leadership within a team, working with other team members to identify the best approaches and solutions
Read about a day in the life of a GDS Site Reliability Engineer on the GDS blog, and watch our video about Becoming a site reliability engineer at GDS.
Person specification
We’re Interested In People Who Have
- strong experience with cloud services, architecture and best practices in Microsoft Azure
- strong experience designing and implementing identity and access management systems using Entra ID, including Conditional Access, PIM and SCIM
- a Platform Engineering mindset, with a proficiency in designing and implementing scalable, resilient, and secure cloud platforms
- strong preference for infrastructure-as-code and automation using tools like Terraform
- experience of using container orchestration systems such as Kubernetes, AKS or serverless application design
- experience supporting large production services
- proficiency in at least one programming language (we use Ruby, Typescript, and Python)
- strong understanding of version control using Git
- experience of creating pipelines in a CI/CD tool like Github Actions or AWS Codepipeline
- a strong understanding of security principles and how to keep large operational services secure
In addition to the above, as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer you will have:
- experience of technical leadership, for example acting as a tech lead for a team or leading a technical initiative
- experience of line management, mentoring or coaching
If you meet a few of those criteria but think that you might not meet every last one then don’t let that stop you from submitting an application.
Benefits
There are many benefits of working at GDS, including:
- flexible hybrid working with flexi-time and the option to work part-time or condensed hours
- a Civil Service Pension with an average employer contribution of 28.97%
- 25 days of annual leave, increasing by a day each year up to a maximum of 30 days
- an extra day off for the King’s birthday
- an in-year bonus scheme to recognise high performance
- career progression and coaching, including a training budget for personal development
- a focus on wellbeing with access to an employee assistance programme
- job satisfaction from making government services easier to use and more inclusive for people across the UK
- advances on pay, including for travel season tickets
- death in service benefits
- cycle to work scheme and facilities
- access to an employee discounts scheme
- 10 learning days per year
- volunteering opportunities (5 special leave days per year)
- access to a suite of learning activities through Civil Service learning
- access to children's holiday play schemes across different locations in central London
Any move to Government Digital Service from another employer will mean you can no longer access childcare vouchers. This includes moves between government departments. You may however be eligible for other government schemes, including Tax Free Childcare. Determine your eligibility at https://www.childcarechoices.gov.uk
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Office attendance
The Department operates a discretionary hybrid working policy, which provides for a combination of working hours from your place of work and from your home in the UK. The current expectation for staff is to attend the office or non-home based location for 40-60% of the time over the accounting period.
DSIT does not normally offer full home working (i.e. working at home); but we do offer a variety of flexible working options (including occasionally working from home).
Things you need to know
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.
Selection process details
The standard selection process for roles at GDS consists of:
- a simple application screening process - we only ask for a CV, responses to 2 knockout questions and a security check question
- Important tip - please ensure that your responses include how you meet the skills and experience listed in the “person specification” section above
- stage 1: a 30 minute telephone interview
- stage 2: a 120 minute panel interview, including a 90 minute technical interview and a 30 minute civil service behavioural interview (conducted over video conferencing)
Depending on how many applications we get, there might also be an extra stage before the video interview, for example a phone interview or a technical exercise.
In The Event We Receive a High Volume Of Applications, We Will Conduct The Initial Sift Against The Lead Criteria Which Is
- strong experience designing and implementing identity and access management systems using Entra ID, including Conditional Access, PIM and SCIM
In the Civil Service, we use Success Profiles to evaluate your skills and ability. This gives us the best possible chance of finding the right person for the job, increases performance and improves diversity and inclusivity. We’ll be assessing your technical abilities, skills, experience and behaviours that are relevant to this role.
For this role we’ll be assessing you against the following Civil Service Behaviours:
- working together
- changing and improving
- making effective decisions
Skills
We will also be assessing your experience and specialist technical skills against the following skills defined in the DDaT DevOps role or Senior DevOps role depending on which role you’ve applied for:
- availability and capacity management
- development process optimisation
- information security
- modern standards approach
- programming and build (software engineering)
- service support
- systems design
- systems integration
Want to know more about who Government Digital and Data are? Click Here
Recruitment Timeline
- Sift completion: 1st September 2026
- Phone Screens: w/c 7
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Skills