Job Description

A Lead System s Engineer is typically the tech nical lead for multidisciplinary teams delivering and operating multiple components for a system .

There are many opportunities to work on national, highly available distributed systems being built and run by in house teams.?The 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.

We now have an exciting opportunit y to join our Demographics team in Product s and Platforms , which builds and operates a set of products including the Pers onal Demographics Service (PDS) and GP Registration



Developing , building and operating national, highly available distributed systems being built and run within NHS England.



Operating within and contributing to the NHS England engineering principles.



Have technical ownership across the system space, including application, environments, infrastructure and networks, pipelines and operational tools.



Engaged in peer - to - peer collaboration to solve engineering problems and drive -up organisation engineering standards . This is a significant part of the Lead Systems Engineer role, in the order of 25% of time.



R esponsible for Engineering maturity within the team.



Coaching and mentoring colleagues to develop the tea m .



Candidates will need to demonstrate experience of the following:



E xperience working on a complex application across all layers of the stack including application, infrastructure, CI/CD, testing, monitoring and alerting etc.



Implementing quality-focussed development practices and testing techniques



Working within a team to deliver software in a collaborative way



E xperience of taking a lead role , for example driving design decisions or managing stakeholders effectively.



Experience of driving and implementing improvements within a product or team.



Our work supports the NHS to deliver high quality services for patients and best value for taxpayers.



Our staff bring expertise across hundreds of specialisms -- including clinical, operational, commissioning, technology, data science, cyber security, software engineering, education, and commercial -- enabling us to design and deliver high-quality NHS services.

We lead the NHS in England by:

Enabling local systems and providers to improve the health of their people and patients and reduce health inequalities



Making the NHS a great place to work, where our people can make a difference and achieve their potential



Working collaboratively to ensure our healthcare workforce has the right knowledge, skills, values and behaviours to deliver accessible, compassionate care



Optimising the use of digital technology, research, and innovation



Delivering value for money



Earlier this year, the Government announced that NHS England will gradually merge with the Department of Health and Social Care, leading to full integration. The aim is to create a smaller, more strategic centre that reduces duplication and eliminates waste.



If successful at interview, we will initiate an Inter Authority Transfer (IAT) via the Electronic Staff Record (ESR). This retrieves key data from your current or previous NHS employer to support onboarding, including competency status, Continuous Service Dates (CSD), and annual leave entitlement. You may opt out at any stage of the recruitment process.



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 non-contractual and subject to review



Please note that the reason for the fixed term of this contract is - Short-term vacancy.



Earlier this year the Government announced that NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care will increasingly merge functions, ultimately leading to NHS England being fully integrated into the Department. The purpose of this change is to create a smaller, more strategic centre which will reduce duplication and eliminate waste.



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



Secondments



Applicants from within the NHS will be offered on a secondment basis only, agreement should be obtained from their employer prior to submitting the application.



On-call



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