Senior Platform Engineer - DBT - G7

Location

Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, London, Salford

About the job

Job summary

If you would like to find out more about the role, the Platform Engineering team and what it’s like to work at DBT, we are holding a Hiring Manager Q&A session for this role where you can virtually 'meet the team' on Friday 17th October at 12:30pm. Please click here to book your spot. 

About us

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) has a clear mission - to grow the economy. Our role is to help businesses invest, grow and export to create jobs and opportunities right across the country. We do this in three ways.

Firstly, we help to build a strong, competitive business environment, where consumers are protected and companies rewarded for treating their employees properly.

Secondly, we open international markets and ensure resilient supply chains. This can be through Free Trade Agreements, trade facilitation and multilateral agreements.

Finally, we work in partnership with businesses every day, providing advance, finance and deal-making support to those looking to start up, invest, export and grow.

The Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) directorate develops and operates tools and services to support us in this mission.

 

About the role

We’ve successfully completed the migration of DBT services from GOV.UK PaaS to our new developer platform in AWS. Now, we’re entering the next phase: evolving this platform into a full Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. 

Are you ready to help shape the future of digital delivery at DBT? 

We’re looking for Platform Engineers to help us build the most performant, secure, and feature-rich hosting environment possible, one that puts developer experience front and centre. This is your chance to be part of something transformative, where your work will directly impact how digital services are built and run across government. 

Job description

As a Senior Platform Engineer, you will work to give development teams the tools for their job, including application performance monitoring, exception, log and metrics aggregation, dashboards, and declarative CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) pipelines.

You’ll evangelise product teams about service-level indicators, objectives, and error budgets, and negotiate them. You’ll help build and scale our global product platform and participate in an on-call rota for which you will receive an additional allowance.

Specific projects the team are working on include rolling out an observability tool to enhance system monitoring and incident response, streamlining deployment processes to reduce downtime and speed up feature delivery, and developing a CLI tool to automate tasks and boost developer productivity.

You will be using:

Amazon Web Services

Azure

AWS CodePipelines and AWS CodeBuild

Terraform & AWS Copilot (CloudFormation)

Docker, Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Elastic Container Registry (ECR)

ElasticSearch/OpenSearch

Python and Django framework

PostgreSQL as a service (Amazon RDS)

Sentry

Redis/Elasticache

Person specification

It is essential that you have:

Cloud experience with either Amazon Web Services, Azure or Google Cloud

Ability to build code-defined, reliable, and well tested infrastructure on top of cloud computing systems (e.g. Terraform, AWS Copilot, CloudFormation, Pulumi)

Experience and fluency in one or more programming languages (e.g., writing clean and effective code)

Knowledge of Linux/Unix fundamentals and TCP/IP networking

Ability to see user impact in the infrastructure and platform changes, including a drive to improve the Developer Experience at every turn

In depth experience of designing solutions to complex technical problems independently 

It is desirable that you have:

Experience in designing and implementing Docker images through containerisation
Experience in prototyping through reuse of existing Open-Source components