REF Senior DevOps Engineer

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REF Senior DevOps Engineer

Salary: £56,745

Hours: Full Time

Contract Type: Fixed Term until December 2029*

Location: Westward House, Stoke Gifford, Bristol, BS34 8SR (Hybrid)

Grade: UKRI Band F

Positions Available: X1

*At the end of the assignment candidates will move into the UKRI redeployment pool and be supported in finding suitable alternative work within the organisation.

Closing Date: 19 Jan 25

ABOUT US

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions, with the most recent exercise concluding in 2021. It is a peer review assessment process involving submissions from higher education institutions across the UK. Research England delivered REF 2021 on behalf of the four UK funding bodies and the results have driven the annual distribution of approximately £2 billion of research funding to UK universities.

We are now developing the systems to deliver REF 2029 and looking for talented individuals to help.

PURPOSE

An exciting opportunity to shape the design, development, and delivery of the UK's next research assessment exercise, REF 2029.

We require systems to be delivered to support:

• Administration of the exercise
• The submission of large volumes of research data from all participating HEIs
• The dissemination and assessment of all elements of the research data submitted.

You will be working in an agile development team following a user centered design approach. We require passionate and innovative team members working with a combination of bespoke software and off-the-shelf products to produce a robust, accessible, and performant suite of systems to support the exercise over the next 5 years.

MAIN OUTPUTS

A Senior DevOps engineer delivers and integrates software to form a complete DevOps toolchain. They are responsible for planning, designing, and delivering the application infrastructure stories and cloud real estate for the project. At this level, you will:

• Transform technical requirements into an effective DevOps toolchain to enable product delivery.
• Provide coaching and mentoring across the wider systems team.
• Make sure deployment strategies for products are repeatable, scalable, and highly available.
• Have deep technical knowledge, providing support to delivery teams and solving complex problems.

Availability and capacity management. Ensure the correct implementation of standards and procedures, identifying capacity issues, stipulating the required changes and instigating these. You know how to initiate remedial action.

Development process optimisation. Analyse current processes, identify and implement opportunities to optimise processes, and lead and develop a team of experts to deliver service improvements. Help to evaluate and establish requirements for the implementation of changes by setting policy and standards.

Information security. You know about information security and can design solutions and services with security controls embedded, specifically engineered as mitigation against security threats as a core part of the solutions and services.

Modern standards approach. You have a strong understanding of and can apply the most appropriate, modern standards and practices. You know how to take responsibility for coaching and guiding others.

Programming and build (software engineering - management). You collaborate with others when necessary to review specifications and use these agreed specifications to design, code, test and document programs or scripts of medium-to-high complexity, using the right standards and tools.

Prototyping. You approach prototyping as a team activity, actively soliciting prototypes and testing with others. You can establish design patterns and iterate them. You can use a variety of methods of prototyping and choose the most appropriate ones.

Service support. You can demonstrate a breadth of understanding of service support. You can identify, locate and fix faults.

Systems design. You can design systems characterised by medium levels of risk, impact, and business or technical complexity. You know how to select appropriate design standards, methods and tools and ensure they are applied effectively. You can review the systems designs of others to ensure selection of appropriate technology, efficient use of resources and the integration of multiple systems and technology.

Systems integration. You can define the integration build. You can coordinate build activities across systems and understand how to undertake and support integration testing activities.

User focus. You know how to collaborate with user researchers and can represent users internally. You understand the difference between user needs and the desires of the user. You can champion user research to focus on all users. You can prioritise and define approaches to understand the user story, guiding others in doing so. You can offer recommendations on the best tools and methods to be used.

ASSESSMENT CRITERIA

(S) - ASSESSED AT SHORTLISTING

(I) - ASSESSED AT INTERVIEW

(S&I) - ASSESSED AT BOTH SHORTLISTING AND INTERVIEW

ESSENTIAL:

• Experience of Securely building infrastructure within the AWS cloud using AWS technologies such as lambda, S3, EC2, ECS, IAM, EBS, Elastic Beanstalk, Route53, SES, RDS, Elasticache, Autoscaling, Load balancers, VPC, etc... (S/I)
• Building and configuring new server platforms and infrastructure, using IaC tools - Terraform (essential), Cloudformation, Ansible (S/I)
• Working experience of databases, such as Oracle/PLSQL, SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL, NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB). (S/I)
• Strong scripting and language skills i.e. Ruby, Bash, Python, JS, Go ...(S/I)
• Experience of working with Development Teams to deliver optimal continuous integration and continuous deployment strategies such as build and test pipelines, blue green deployments with CI/CD Tools like Codepipeline, Bitbucket Pipelines, Github Actions, Jenkins GitLab, CircleCI, API Gateway etc... (S/I)
• Experience of core technologies such as containerization (docker), container orchestration (Kubernetes/ECS) (S/I)
• Identification and development of resources to establish a sustainable internal capability for long term DevOps and hosting needs. (S/I)

DESIRABLE:

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills (I)
• Strong planning and delivery skills delivered with care, accuracy and attention to detail. (I)
• Extensive experience of Agile software development and working in SCRUM teams. (I)
• Assessing the DevOps maturity of the organisation and identifying/implementing improvements as applicable. (I)
• Installation and management of COTS/open source monitoring tools such as Splunk, Nagios, New Relic, AppDynamics, ELK... (I)
• Instrumentation and Telemetry - Cloudwatch (essential), AWS XRay, Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, Datadog, Splunk, New Relic (I)
• Working experience of other software such as Jira, Confluence, Stash, Nexus, Artifactory, SonarQube...(I)
• DBA or database optimisation experience (I)
• Background in Development or strong modern application experience. (I)
• Migrations, lift and shift / serverless migration (I)
• Agile, integration with bespoke and 3rd party off the shelf (I)
• Proven ability to build effective relationships internally and with third party suppliers and employees. (I)

APPLICATIONS

Online applications only for this role. Please submit a CV and covering letter to the attachments section (ignore free textbox for cover letter under 'Experience' section) which clearly outlines how you fulfil the criteria specified along with your motivation for the role. Ensure that the job reference number is included in the filename description of each document uploaded. Note that failure to address the above criteria or submit an application without a covering letter may result in the application not being considered. Assessment will only be based upon the content of your submitted covering letter and CV and not the 'Experience' section of the application process.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

DEVELOPING TALENT:

We are committed to developing employees in their roles throughout their career. Learning and development plans enable employees to continue their professional development through training and development opportunities such as e-learning, classroom training and on-the-job experiences. We encourage our employees to share their learning across teams and organisations.

BENEFITS:

UKRI can offer the successful candidate:

- Flexible Working

- 30 days annual leave + Public Holidays

- Access to Civil Service Pension Scheme

- Various everyday discounts through our dedicated provider

Visit our dedicated benefits webpage for more info: Benefits of working at UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)

About Research England

Research England is one of the nine Councils within UK Research and Innovation. As a key component of the research funding system, Research England will oversee UKRI's England-only functions in relation to university research and knowledge exchange (KE). This includes providing grant funding to English universities for related activities; developing and implementing the Research Excellence Framework in partnership with the UK Higher Education funding bodies; supervising the sustainability of the Higher Education research base in England; guide the UK Research Partnership Investment Fund; and coordinate the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF). Research England will build and sustain the conditions for a healthy and dynamic research and KE system in English universities. They also work closely with their counterparts in the Devolved Administrations.

For more information about Research England, click here.

About UK Research Innovation (UKRI)

UKRI is an organisation that brings together the seven disciplinary research councils, Research England and Innovate UK. Together, we build an independent organisation with a strong voice and vision ensuring the UK maintains its world-leading position in research and innovation.

Supporting some of the world's most exciting and challenging research projects, we develop and operate some of the most remarkable scientific facilities in the world. We are pushing the frontiers of human knowledge through fundamental research and delivering benefits for UK society and the economy through world-class research, skills and business-led innovation.

More information can be found at www.ukri.org.

Choosing to come to work at UKRI means that you will have access to a whole host of benefits from a defined benefit pension scheme, excellent holiday entitlement, access to employee shopping/travel discounts and salary sacrifice cycle to work scheme. For more details, visit Benefits of working at UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

The role holder will be required to have the appropriate level of security screening/vetting required for the role. UKRI reserves the right to run or re-run security clearance as required during the course of employment.

How we support EDI in the workforce

At UKRI, we believe that everyone has a right to be treated with dignity and respect, and to be provided with equal opportunities to thrive and succeed in an environment that enables them to do so. We also value diversity of thought and experience within inclusive groups, organisations and the wider community. For further information, please visit 'How we support EDI in the workforce'.

Disability Confident Employer

As users of the disability confident scheme, we guarantee to interview all disabled applicants who meet the minimum criteria for the vacancy/ies. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.

How to apply

Online applications only preferred for this role. Please submit a CV and covering letter which clearly outlines how you fulfil the criteria specified along with your motivation for UKRI and the role. Ensure that the job reference number is included in the filename description of each document uploaded. Note that failure to address the above criteria or submit an application without a covering letter may result in the application not being considered. Assessment will only be based upon the content of your submitted covering letter and CV and not the 'experience' section of the application.

UKRI seeks to ensure it creates and maintains a system of openness, fairness and inclusion - a collaborative, trusted environment, which is attractive to and accessible to everyone who is interested in developing their career with us.