Job summary
- Main area
- Administration
- Grade
- NHS AfC: Band 8b
- Contract
- Permanent
- Hours
- Full time
- Job share
- Flexible working
- Job ref
- 990-TD-P&P-18880-E
- Employer
- NHS England
- Employer type
- NHS
- Site
- Any NHSE Office
- Town
- Nationally
- Salary
- £77,346 - £89,875 pa includes a RRP payment of 20% (exclusive of London Weighting)
- Salary period
- Yearly
- Closing
- 14/12/2025 23:59
Employer heading
Lead Systems Engineer
NHS AfC: Band 8b
Our Organisation
The NHS is building a culture that is positive, compassionate and inclusive – and we all have our part to play.
As employers we are committed to protecting and promoting the physical and mental health and wellbeing of all our colleagues. This underpins our values as set out in the NHS Constitution and supports us to be an Employer of Choice, while helping our colleagues to deliver high quality services for our patients and communities.
As a flexible employer, we want to support you to work in a way that is best for the NHS, our patients and you. Talk to us about how we might be able to accommodate a flexible working arrangement whether that’s a job share, part time, hybrid working or another flexible pattern. In addition, although the role advertised may have a ‘home’ office base indicated, we remain committed to supporting flexibility around workplace locations. If it works for the service, we will do our best to make it work for you.
We are an accredited Living Wage Employer which means that every colleague working for our organisation and third-party contractors will earn a real Living Wage. We are one of over 15,000 organisations, who voluntarily chose to pay the real Living Wage.
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 now have an exciting opportunity to join our Demographics team in Products and Platforms, which builds and operates a set of products including the Personal Demographics Service (PDS) and GP Registration
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.
Detailed job description and main responsibilities
Earlier this year 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. The purpose of this change is to create a smaller, more strategic centre which will reduce duplication and eliminate waste.
You can find further details about the role, including key responsibilities and accountabilities, alongside the organisational structure and person specification in the attached Job Description and other supporting documents.
The post of Lead Systems Engineer has been awarded a Recruitment and Retention Premia (RRP) in response to current labour market conditions. In recognition of this, the role attracts an additional monthly RRP payment equal to 20% per annum.
Please be aware that RRP is non-contractual and subject to review.
On-call
Participation in a shared on-call rota is required to support a 24/7/365 service, this rota covers evenings, weekends, and public holidays.
Person specification
Skills and Knowledge
Essential criteria
- Implementing quality-focussed development practices and testing techniques
- Working within a team to deliver software in a collaborative way
Experience
Essential criteria
- Experience working on a complex application across all layers of the stack including application, infrastructure, CI/CD, testing, monitoring and alerting etc.
- 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.
Qualifications
Essential criteria
- Masters or equivalent qualification, specifically in a computer, scientific or mathematical subject or equivalent experience.
Applicant requirements
This post will require a submission for Disclosure to be made to check for any unspent criminal convictions.
Documents to download
Further details / informal visits contact
- Name
- Andrew Blundell
- Job title
- Consultant Systems Engineer
- Email address
- [email protected]
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