Job overview

A Lead Systems Engineer is typically the technical lead for multidisciplinary teams delivering and operating multiple components for a system. 

We 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 have an exciting opportunity to join our Demographics team in Products and Platforms, which builds and operates services including the Personal Demographics Service (PDS), GP Registration and Single Unique Identifier (SUI) capability.

These national critical systems enable safe, reliable identification across health and care — supporting services used by hundreds of thousands of people every day.

Main duties of the job

• 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. 
• Responsible for Engineering maturity within the team. 
• Coaching and mentoring colleagues to develop the team. 
• Candidates will need to demonstrate experience of the following: 
• Experience 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 
• Experience 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.
• Working within a team to deliver software in a collaborative way

Working for our organisation

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.