Lead Infrastructure Engineer - Home Office - G7

Croydon, Manchester, Sheffield, Glasgow

The Automation & Innovation (A&I) function is the Home Office's strategic partner for automation, AI, and innovation delivery, operating within the Chief Technology Office. Automation & Innovation delivers secure, value driven solutions that remove manual effort, improve operational efficiency, and enable smarter ways of working across the department.

Our AI as a Service platform is a critical enabler for AI delivery across the department. This trailblazing multi-cloud service is creating secure, scalable and reusable AI microservices to enable teams across the Home Office to harness AI to transform public services. The successful candidate for this role will join our growing AI as a Service team.

As Lead Infrastructure Engineer for AI as a Service, you will lead and direct our AI infrastructure team in building, managing, transitioning, supporting and maintaining AI solutions according to departmental policy and foster open feedback and continuous learning with service support to ensure continuous improvement. You are responsible for overall management activities such as workforce planning, budgeting, technology roadmaps, projects and tasks.

You will oversee programmes and projects and work with Technical Architects to translate the architectural designs into operational systems and support technical architects.

You will be responsible for coordinating with third party provision of infrastructure services and the provision of expertise to deliver architectural solutions for infrastructure services throughout the service lifecycle.

Where business needs allow, some roles may be suitable for a combination of office and home-based working. Where this is the case, employees will be expected to spend a minimum of 60% of their working time in the office. Applicants can raise any queries to the email address at the bottom of the advert.

Watch this short video to hear from members of Home Office Digital talking about the projects they work on and their experience of working here: Working for Home Office Digital.

Your main day to day responsibilities will be:

• Leading the AI as a Service team in the implementation, administration and support of infrastructure solutions and services.
• Reviewing systems designs to ensure selection of appropriate technology, efficient use of resources, integration of multiple systems and technology and that 'Secure by Design' principles have been followed.
• Managing planning of system and/or acceptance tests, coordinating both functional and non-functional specifications and provide authoritative advice and guidance on test planning.
• Troubleshooting and identifying problems across different technology capabilities including compute, storage, networking, physical infrastructure, software, cloud, commercial off the shelf (COTS) and ovia specification and configuration of automated monitoring, logging, and alerting systems, and manual interventions.
• Establishing standards and procedures across a service lifecycle including the development lifecycle and ensure that practitioners adhere to this.
• Manage resources to ensure that the HO teams are onboarded to AIaaS effectively and new microservices can be integrated into the AIaaS platform.
• After a solution has been integrated, you will evaluate the success of the project, identifying best practices and lessons learned. You will provide feedback to teams and incorporate this information into future plans.
• Managing, coaching and mentoring more junior engineers.

Tools and Technologies we use:

We are keen for Engineers to continue learning new technologies, we have a large range in the Home Office including:

• Backend: Java, Node.js, C#, Python, PHP, Scala, Power platform
• Frontend: React, JavaScript, Typescript, Angular
• Data: PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Mongodb, Apache Cassandra
• DevOps: AWS, Kubernetes, Azure, Jenkins, Docker, Ansible, Terraform
• AI: Azure ML Studio, Python, Github Copilot, OpenAI

Working pattern

This role is available on a full-time basis with the option of compressed hours working. This role is also suitable for part-time working hours, with a minimum requirement to work 3 days per week due to business requirements.

Essential Skills

You'll have a demonstrable passion for Infrastructure Engineering, with the following skills or strong experience in:

• Managing and delivering complex technologies, including design and deployment of AI solutions to cloud platforms, within time, cost and quality targets. (HSIN, ITOP)( Lead essential criteria).
• Leading the technology team to adhere to good engineering principles from architecture through to deployment (DESN, TEST)
• Providing leadership to the teams responsible for delivery of the service through effective direction and coaching (OFCL)
• Different methodologies including Agile, waterfall and continuous integration principles (TEST)
• Building strong partnerships with diverse teams across multiple technologies and areas of the organisation (OFCL)
• Advising on future technology changes and innovations and defining best practice for network improvements and information security (ITOP).
• Providing timely incident response, triage and resolution for issues raised through infrastructure monitoring, dashboards, or user reporting (USUP).