System Engineer; Cloud Engineer

Overview

The System Engineer (Cloud Engineer) will be working on national, highly available distributed systems built and run across NHS England. The systems differ in size, scale and purpose. An example system will have the following characteristics:

• Round‑the‑clock availability at a level of 99.9% or higher
• National‑scale impact on unavailability
• Load to support a daily transactional user base of more than one hundred thousand people
• Modern Cloud best‑practices and open standards to support interoperability and re‑usability with security first principles
• High availability through operational simplicity by lowering mean‑time‑to‑repair rather than increasing mean‑time‑between‑failure
• Flexible low‑cost horizontal scale‑out to handle expected and unexpected variations in load
• Architectural trade‑offs to avoid logical bottlenecks
• Security controls appropriate for the storage of large volumes of sensitive data – hundreds of millions of records and documents
• Direct clinical impact on patient care and/or health research

• Develop in the "system" space, covering the application, environments, infrastructure & networks, pipelines, and operational tools (monitoring, alerting, code repositories, etc.).
• Act as a tech lead for a squad delivering components for national systems, or collaborate with peers on larger‑scale projects.
• Adopt Cloud and open‑source technologies following Agile, Lean and Dev Ops delivery practices.
• Design and deliver high‑quality NHS services that support clinical, operational, commissioning, technology, data science, cyber security, software engineering, education and commercial specialisms.
• Ensure interoperability, re‑usability and security across the national solutions.

Staff recruited from outside the NHS will usually be appointed at the bottom of the pay band. Colleagues with a contractual office base are expected to spend, on average, at least 40% of their time working in our offices.