Home Office: we’re hiring DevOps Engineers

Want to join our team of DevOps Engineers, working alongside our architects, technical leads, and product leaders to deliver new initiatives and services for the public?

If so, take a look at our current DevOps roles on offer:

• DevOps Engineer – closes Sunday 4 July
• Senior DevOps Engineer – closes Sunday 4 July

We’re running a live recruitment event on 27 July where you can find out more about our work. You’ll hear from some of the engineering team, learn about our career development opportunities and have the chance to ask us questions.

These 2 job apps close before the event, so here’s a bit of info about what it’s like to work with us.

DevOps at the Home Office

DevOps is confusing. Is it a management practice? Is it a skillset? Is it a platform? I tend to think that it’s a bit of all of these, and is unique to your organisation.

At the Home Office, we’re working on cutting edge stuff: Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform and Amazon Web Service (AWS) across a number of platforms, with a stack of new opportunities available.

We are working in agile, interdisciplinary teams to build and operate public facing services – doing some important and interesting stuff. We have also made massive inroads into infrastructure as code.

We can provision resources consistently and efficiently and manage them through life, pushing those foundational software development principles, such as versioning and peer review, to create and maintain robust, auditable, scalable and cost-efficient environments for both development and production.

Our platforms

The Home Office delivers tons of technology.

We have a couple of common platforms which allow developers to define new Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines rapidly, getting code into a product, through testing and into production in a timely manner. They are the Application Container Platform (ACP) and our borders and immigration-focused platform, Environment Build Support Administration (EBSA).

Using these platforms, our technical staff can rapidly start work and improve their productivity without having to develop bespoke environments. The platforms are forming a key component in our DevOps future. They also provide a focal point for the domains of Dev and Ops to collaborate.

Our people

Our people and their skillsets align with the Government Digital Service (GDS) DevOps role definition, building new DevOps processes, complex stories, environments and removing impediments. Home Office DevOps professionals contribute to the definition, development and support of our platforms.
The more time we can spend with users to improve service delivery and quality the better.

We definitely need more of these skillsets to drive our approaches and tools forwards. If you think you’ve got them, we’d love to hear from you.

Our contracts

We can’t do all the work ourselves. So we need to push really hard to ensure that:

• we avoid dependence on our suppliers
• everyone understands our preferred way of working
• we leverage common approaches where they exist, thinking particularly about platforms

To help meet these goals we are developing central commercial approaches which provide a solid foundation, but there is a lot to work on here.

Our principles

Our work is guided by common principles:

• culture and holistic thinking – we use playbooks for defining and running multi-disciplinary teams, actively use the GDS Service Standard across the organisation, and put users first
• ownership and ‘no silos’ – we put shared platforms, tools and teams in place so ownership is clear but barriers for collaboration are removed
• measurement and feedback – we are embedding many feedback loops to provide continuous improvement
• automation and flow – we are building automation into systems where we can, and our Quality Assurance Testing functions are adopting automation as the norm and embedding alongside our engineers

Our future

Our DevOps culture is going from strength to strength. In the end, it’s all about people. So if you want to get involved look out for Home Office tech roles on CS Jobs or view further information about our engineering position on Stack Overflow.