Job overview

The System Engineer (Cloud Engineer) will be working on national, highly available distributed systems being built and run across NHS England. 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 with security first principles.
• Achieve high availability through operational simplicity by lowering mean-time-to-repair rather than increasing mean-time-between-failure not contract management; by focussing on engineering excellence.
• 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 and/or health research
• System Engineers (Cloud Engineers) could be a tech lead for a squad delivering components for national systems. Or working with peers on larger scale projects.

Main duties of the job

System Engineers (Cloud Engineers) are responsible for developing in the “system” space, which includes the application but is broader: it means the application, the environments, infrastructure & networks on which it runs, the pipelines that build, deploy and test it, and the tools that allow the team to operate it (e.g. monitoring & alerting tools, code repositories, etc). NHS England utilises Agile, Lean and DevOps delivery practices, with an emphasis on Internet facing services using Cloud and Open Source technology to create large scale national solutions for the NHS.

Working for our organisation

NHS England has a wide range of statutory functions, responsibilities and regulatory powers. These are focused on supporting the wider NHS to deliver high quality care, as well as doing those things that are best done once for the whole NHS.

Our staff bring expertise across clinical, operational, commissioning, technology, data science, cyber security, software engineering, education, and commercial specialisms — enabling us to design and deliver high-quality NHS services.

In March 2025, the Government announced that NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care will increasingly merge functions, ultimately leading to NHS England being fully integrated into the department. 

If you currently work within the NHS and 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 process.

Colleagues with a contractual office base are expected to spend, on average, at least 40% of their time working in our offices.

Staff recruited from outside the NHS will usually be appointed at the bottom of the pay band.

We cannot offer visa sponsorship for any vacancies.