Software Engineer at Cabinet Office, London/Remote, 6 Months, £Contract Rate

The SitCen will bring together a unique set of skilled people, capabilities, and experience from across HMG, operating 24/7 to support horizon scanning and crisis-response across the full range of national risks, from civil emergencies to national security issues. We work with partners across and beyond government to innovate and experiment with new technology and analytical techniques at the sharpest end of HMG crisis response, supporting our leaders in decision-making. We integrate brilliant minds, innovative technology, incredible teamwork, and collaboration to make the UK safer, and help bring the absolute best of HMG to the toughest crisis challenges that our nation faces. We pride ourselves on our team culture, which is operationally focussed, innovative, compassionate, and inclusive, and continuously learning.

The SitCen forms part of the Cabinet Office Civil Contingencies Secretariat, sitting alongside COBR facilities, as a key part of HMG’s crisis response infrastructure. The SitCen is not an operations centre, a replacement for departmental facilities, or responsible for helping data to inform wider government policy. Over time, the SitCen will aim to improve data and insights for situational awareness of potential and emerging crises, visualising data in ways that help senior decision makers navigate a complex data landscape and shortening development times to produce insights into unpredicted crises and events. The service it provides and approaches it uses will continuously develop as technology, HMG data holdings and connectivity improve.

As a Software Engineer your main responsibilities would be: 

• Supporting the SitCen Software Engineers in their Data Pipeline automation work.
• Providing technical support capability, solving more challenging platform use and configuration issues.
• Writing scripts to deliver/work with our platforms, such as developing terraform files.
• Ensuring working to our appropriate standards, ensuring high service quality.
• AWS Infrastructure Design & Implementation.
• Deployment, automation, management, and maintenance of AWS cloud-based production system.
• System troubleshooting and problem resolution across various application domains and platforms.
• Pre-production acceptance testing for quality assurance.
• Providing recommendations for architecture and process improvements.
• Definition and deployment of systems for metrics, logging, and monitoring on AWS platform.
• Designing, maintenance and management of tools for automation of different operational processes.
• Self-service mindset in building tools and software.

You’ll have relevant experience in:

• SC Clearance is an essential requirement for this role, as a minimum you must be eligible and willing to undergo these checks.
• Strong Python skills and experience of end-to-end AWS Data Pipeline work.
• Strong AWS experience in developing and maintaining applications in serverless environments using distributed architecture and AWS tools (including Lambda, Glue, Redshift, Sage maker, IAM, Athena, EC2, Kinesis, CloudWatch, CloudTrail).
• Experience with Python.
• SQL - Postgres / AWS Aurora.
• DevOps background with good knowledge of cloud-based IAC technologies. Terraform or serverless.
• Git as version control.
• Familiar with CI/CD.

Desirable:

• Active SC Clearance.
• Experience with Tableau including deployment as well as usage.
• Experience with GitHub and GitHub actions and codepipline.
• Any exposure to Machine Learning is a bonus.
• Experience of graphing plugins and packages.