Hi, I’m Ben Conrad and I work in HMRC’s Digital Operations team. We are currently recruiting for a range of different posts, including DevOps engineers, and I wanted to write a quick post explaining a bit about what we do and why we’re looking for people to join the team.
What does world-class look like?
HMRC is made up of different Delivery Groups. Digital Operations is the group that builds and operates HMRC’s Multi-channel Digital Tax Platform, or MDTP. I’ll explain what that means.
The Tax Platform was conceived and built as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) in order to allow teams delivering digital services to have a common and simplified platform for them to operate on.
Two years ago, the Tax Platform achieved a significant success (and won awards) by moving to a multi-active model across different cloud providers.
The number of digital services running on the Tax Platform grows every month, and in order to continue providing a world-class service, Digital Operations needs to innovate and utilise new technologies that become available to support the scale at which we now operate.
As part of this drive, late last year we successfully migrated the entire Tax Platform onto hyperscale cloud, which brings enormous advantages in terms of resilience, scale and importantly cost to the taxpayer.
We are only able to deliver these projects by harnessing together the skills of dedicated DevOps engineers within an Agile, product-centric work environment.
Be part of our skilled team
Digital Operations is now looking to recruit skilled and experienced DevOps engineers to join our agile teams to help us identify and take advantage of what the latest technologies make possible. We anticipate that this year that’ll include overhauling our metrics pipeline, moving to a new container technology, and developing new build and deployment tooling to compliment these.
Throughout these changes the focus remains fixed on providing the best service we can to the digital teams we work with, in order to deliver hundreds of digital services that customers use every day.
Shaping the future
You may be wondering what makes a DevOps engineer? We consider DevOps to encompass an approach to work that combines the ability to write and review code, alongside the capacity to troubleshoot operational problems in the cloud technologies we use. This becomes extremely effective when operating in Agile teams, collaborating to achieve continuous delivery using open source software.
On a practical level, the essential skills are listed on the job adverts, but if you have experience with AWS, Docker, ElasticSearch, distributed source control and can write a bit of Python and Ruby, then please do apply. You would be joining a fast paced and fun environment, working with the latest kit and helping shape the public services of the future.
We are currently recruiting at two levels, Web Operations Engineer and Senior Web Operations Engineer both offering a competitive and negotiable (depending on experience) starting salary. These are technical roles, and as such we are sifting and interviewing based upon skills that are essential to be able to work in our teams, with less emphasis on the civil service competency framework so often used for civil service roles.
If you like the sound of Digital Operations and you’re looking for a role with a clear, well defined career path in an energetic team why not apply? The link is below.
Ben Conrad, Digital Product Owner
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