Senior Cloud Engineer - Police ICT : Job Details

Join Police Digital Service as a Senior Cloud Engineer - starting salary £75,000

We are looking for a dedicated Senior Cloud Engineer to join our Technical Operations Function. This home-based role involves utilising your expertise as an Azure subject matter expert to ensure secure, stable, and scalable solutions. Acting as a Technical Leader, you will have the opportunity to embrace modern infrastructure-as-code practices, expand your technical skills through training and certification, and make a significant impact on the delivery of National IT Services on behalf of Policing.

About Police Digital Service

Police Digital Service strives to be the go-to partner for technology developments and programmes across UK policing. Our team provides technical advice and delivers services to help policing and law enforcement organisations across the UK prioritise and focus on technology efforts.

Key Responsibilities

• Technically lead from the front, as an Azure subject matter expert
• Act on the principle that “what can be automated should be automated”
• Work with the Technical Operations Manager and Head of Technical Operations to identify skills gaps within technical teams
• Act as a point of escalation for on-call engineers and participate in the Technical Operations on-call rota as required
• Perform root cause analysis to diagnose configuration and deployment issues
• Implement a scheduled program of application upgrades, vulnerability management patching, and firmware/software upgrades
• Monitor and review the quality of service delivered
• Work closely with security teams to safeguard our systems from emerging threats, operating within agreed security frameworks
• Cloud infrastructure management: Design, deploy and maintain cloud infrastructure, ensuring optimal performance, security, and scalability
• Cloud migration: Responsible for planning, executing, and managing cloud migrations of applications, workloads and infrastructure from on-premises or other cloud environments to a target cloud platform
• Resource provisioning: Allocate and manage cloud resources such as compute, storage, and networking to meet the needs of applications and services
• Configuration management: Define and implement infrastructure configurations and manage changes to maintain consistency
• Automation: Develop and implement automation scripts and tools to streamline and simplify repetitive tasks
• Monitoring: Set up and maintain monitoring tools to track the performance, availability, and security of cloud services, proactively identifying and resolving issues
• Incident response:Troubleshoot and resolve incidents, collaborating with development and IT teams to minimize downtime and maintain service quality
• Security and compliance: Implement and enforce security policies, best practices, and compliance requirements to protect sensitive data and maintain cloud infrastructure integrity
• Cost optimization: Monitor and analyse cloud resource usage to identify opportunities for cost

What you need to succeed in the role

• Azure professional certifications (e.g. Solutions Architect Expert, DevOps Engineer Expert)
• Detailed knowledge of Azure best practices
• Expert knowledge of one or more programming languages (e.g. Python) and continuous integration / delivery approaches and tools (e.g. GitHub, Azure DevOps)
• In-depth knowledge of the design and development of applications on Azure
• Adept at leveraging automation to improve development processes and optimise software delivery
• Effective communication skills to be able to gather and interpret requirements and communicate results
• Comfortable engaging with customers and prospects along with evangelising both PDS and Azure service propositions
• Ability to breakdown and solve complex technical problems across multiple technology domains

For a full list of responsibilities and essential/desirable criteria, please refer to the Candidate Pack.

Why Join us?

• Balance is important and we want you to take time off to recharge – we offer 28 days’ annual leave plus bank holidays, rising to 30 days after 5 years of service. Holiday Purchase also available.
• Flexible working hours - We trust you to do your job and we appreciate that life doesn’t always fit around a 9 to 5 workday. We operate core hours of 10 to 4, Monday to Friday (37hr week)
• We care about your well-being – we have an EAP that offers not just welfare benefits but also retail discounts
• Plan for the future – we offer an excellent pension scheme and life assurance cover
• Put your mind at rest regarding your health – offering remote GP, mental health and physiotherapy appointments via video consultation
• Family - Enhanced maternity and paternity pay along with a flexible return to work
• Community - one paid day off per year for volunteering

You can find out more here:Benefits – Police Digital Service (pds.police.uk)

Diversity, equity and inclusion

We are committed to equal opportunity for all and will not discriminate on any grounds. We encourage applications from people from the widest possible span of experience. We particularly  welcome applications from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) candidates and people with disabilities. 

Working Arrangements

This is a remote role. 

We may choose to close the advert early if we receive a high volume of applications for this role, so please endeavour to complete your application as soon as possible.

All applicants must be eligible for NPPV3 and SC clearances. Successful applicants will require NPPV3 clearance to have been approved before starting with PDS.