Senior Development Operations (DevOps) Engineer

Description:

The Resources Directorate provides corporate support to the Mayor and the Assembly and is responsible for the following functions: finance, legal, procurement, internal audit, technology group (TG) and facilities management (FM). The Directorate’s Executive Director also acts as the Authority’s chief finance officer and manages the Authority’s shared services arrangement with TfL to provide legal and procurement advice.

About the team

The GLA’s Digital Experience Unit is responsible for the delivery of all internal and external digital products and services at the GLA.

The unit is responsible for the design, delivery, and management of dozens digital, data and technology services that support the delivery of the functions of the Mayor and the Assembly; and, in doing so, directly serve Londoners.

The GLA’s largest and most visible digital products, the London Datastore and Talk London – are used by millions of Londoners every year and provide the GLA with platforms for communications, convening, public engagement, data and information-sharing, and transparency. These services support delivery, scrutiny, and democratic engagement at scale and at a low cost per user compared to non-digital channels and services.

This role will sit within the Delivery team, and report into Head of Delivery. The post will work very closely with inhouse and third-party development and testing suppliers.

About the role

The GLA has been at the forefront of digital and data innovation in London since its inception – will you join us as we make an exciting step change in our digital capability?

Digital and data services play a critical role in enabling the delivery of the functions of the Mayor of London and the London Assembly – and it’s critical to ensure these are reliable and of high quality.

As the Development/Operations (Dev Ops) Engineer in our Delivery team you will be responsible for all development and test environments, assist with transition of systems to Production and ensuring that our most complex and business-critical products can be relied upon by users.

You will have extensive experience of developing and continuously providing technical support for testing and QA, deployment automation/Continuous Integration, and release management.

Drive the GLA to be an exemplar digital organisation, adopting and maintaining best in class practises for technology, digital and data to support its work and to engage and collaborate with Citizens and Stakeholders.

You’ll also take responsibility for talent development to improve our technical capabilities and DevOps environment, including continuous integration.

You’ll have a passion for problem solving and applying a systematic and scalable approach to improving software quality.

What your day will look like

Lead development and rollout of a continuous integration and deployment pipeline across the GLA’s Digital estate, use of containerisation techniques where appropriate, and working collaboratively with other departments.

Design and implement infrastructure as code using Terraform (or similar) to provision performant and secure infrastructure. Use cross-platform APIs and automation/deployment technologies such as Ansible (or similar) to orchestrate automated cloud platform deployments and system builds

Lead to ensure inhouse and outsourced developers, system administrators and technical architects use best practise DevOps approaches to design, architect, automate and implement highly available, preformat and fault-tolerant, secure environments, with multi-cloud capability primarily starting on AWS.

Lead on implementing and maintaining the monitoring solution for digital services and implementing robust security controls and monitoring solutions – across infrastructure and application components - for web services deployed using public cloud platforms.

Define and implement DevOps methodology (consulting with technical colleagues) for the GLA using practices recommended in the GDS Service Standard. Support the team to extend our continuous integration pipeline across our digital estate.

Diagnose and resolve issues within application deployment pipelines, using standard debugging tools to track down and identify root causes. Create new diagnostic policies and procedures. Work independently to find solutions / identify problems and in collaboration with in-house Dev Ops team, Technical Architect, and third-party suppliers Developers to solve more challenging issues.

Lead on system health checks and support audits for existing digital services. Advise and establish best practice.

Responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining developer procedures (handbook) and oversee and work with external third-party suppliers and cloud service providers to ensure they adhere to our technical standards and the Developer’s handbook. and that the GLA drives the maximum value from any third-party service providers and that the right knowledge is transferred in-house.

Continuously improve your own knowledge of work areas, drive the Development community of practice, and embrace the Agile framework of software delivery. Support colleagues to reach full agility using DevOps best practices including continuous integrations, delivery, and release.

Work with members of GLA’s test team to integrate automated tests into the build and deployment pipelines

Skills, knowledge, and experience

To be considered for the role you must meet the following essential criteria:

Educated to degree level in relevant subject such as computer science with core development element or equivalent level qualification or experience of working at a similar level in specialist area

Proficiency/experience with DevOps approaches to application testing and deployment

Experience of automated deployment of applications and services to AWS.

Experience of designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines in a microservice architecture, using platforms such as Jenkins to automate software builds/deploys and server provisioning