Site Reliability Engineer (Inside IR35) (Active SC Clearance required)

Site Reliability Engineer (Inside IR35) (Active SC Clearance required)

Contract Term: 6 Months 

Contracting Authority: DWP 

Location: Remote UK / Locations: Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Peel Park or Sheffield 

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is an enabling role for WCS, bringing a focus on application reliability and operational efficiency that will help DWP achieve its goals to 'Provide Constant Availability', 'Deliver Service Excellence', 'Drive Down Operational Costs and Risks', 'Provide Actionable Insight and Visibility', and 'Streamline Change Across the Estate'. SRE combines software and systems engineering to build and run large-scale, massively distributed, fault-tolerant systems. They work with the application, infrastructure and database developers to increase reliability and reduce down time and uptime targets. SREs ensure that DWP’s services (both internally critical and externally-visible systems) have reliability and uptime that meet business and citizen's needs. They are also responsible for continuous improvement, while maintaining application capacity and performance. They devise and implement optimisations and automations that reduce technical debt; reduce operational costs and risks; automate toil; and improve the quality of the application code. They are involved from the initial application idea all the way through the application lifecycle to decommissioning.

Lead Site Reliability Engineer you will lead a team of senior SREs who are each accountable for the reliability of DWP business and citizen-facing applications. You will collaborate with product owners and other senior stakeholders across the business to define, monitor, and dashboard application performance. You will balance the priorities of the SRE team such that continuous improvements to application reliability are consistently achieved, balanced against the needs of the application delivery projects. You will implement SRE best practice within your team and across relevant teams where SREs are embedded. You will have proven experience in the full application development lifecycle including operational support, performance and capacity management and effective management of major incidents.

Imagine having a talent that could benefit someone you’ve never met and solve problems you didn’t even know existed. Well, you do, and you can. And we’re here to help you do just that. At PSR we are the go-to place for talented contractors and temps for a rich variety of public sector roles.

As a Site Reliability Engineer your main responsibilities would be: 

• Manage and optimise the ratio of toil to incident and problem resolution 
• Define and mitigate relevant risks to application reliability, working with senior stakeholders 
• Build trusted relationships with key stakeholders across the business and provide executive authority for escalation of major incidents 
• Improve the alignment of application performance to citizen needs and business sensitivities through the use of SLOs and error budgets 
• Monitor on-call rotations and workloads across the team to prevent burnout 
• Set the strategic direction to maintain pace with the wider industry, by defining criteria for personal development in the context of SRE 
• Design and lead the strategies for building scalable SRE practice 
• Consult with senior stakeholders and provide a full analysis and recommendations, which usually influences the final decision. 
• Advise on problems arising from specific work programmes or from implementation of proposed changes in Departmental policy, and make balanced recommendations. 
• Drive innovation in ways of working throughout the team and encourage experimentation where opportunities arise 
• Model and demonstrate appropriate business behaviours, good practice, and the intelligent applications of industry methods and techniques 
   

You’ll have relevant experience in:

• Previous experience of working for a government dept. • Passionate about improving internal processes
• Understanding of security engineering and security best practice 
• Ability to architect and administer scalable, cloud-native and on premise applications 
• Strong time management, and change management skills. 
• Strong communications skills across multiple stakeholder types 
• Strong skills in setting, communicating, implementing, and achieving business objectives and goals through direct management 
• Skilled knowledge and ability in modifying and maintaining systems and code developed by other engineers 
• The ability to lead engineers in a complex, multi-disciplinary environment, delivering products within specific timescales
• Presenting the service portfolio/catalogue and complex technical issues to non-technical audiences 
• Wider knowledge of industry solutions utilised in service monitoring, automation, analysis and effective Site Reliability Engineering 
• Senior stakeholder engagement and management 
• Programme-level risk management 
• Leading continuous improvement 
• Extensive experience of implementing multi-project deployment and release processes in a continuous delivery environment
• Experience of leading multiple engineering teams in a complex, multi-disciplinary environment, delivering products within specific time-scales and working alongside multiple senior stakeholders 
• Experience of managing a large estate of legacy code, progressively evolving it towards better more consistent standards, individually and as a team

If this Site Reliability Engineer role sounds like something that you would be interested in, please click the link to apply and speak to one of our PSR team now.

"In applying for this role you acknowledge the following; this role falls in scope of the Off Payroll Working in the Public Sector legislation. Any rates of payment quoted will reflect the gross rate per day for the assignment, and will be subject to appropriate taxes and statutory costs. As such the payment to the intermediary and your income resulting from this contract will be different."