Lead Platform Engineer (Specialist) in RTGS - CNI Platforms na Bank of England

A Day in the Role 

CNI Platform hosts RTGS, which settles more than £800billion a day, and is essential to the UK economy. Each day brings new challenges and opportunities, creating an environment suited for those who work well in a fast-paced setting. An individual whose approach is getting it “right” in tight timescales can make a real difference.

A typical day would start with the team’s stand-up meeting for the current sprint where you’ll discuss your workload and any blockers, or you may attend a major incident management meeting where, as the senior engineer on call, you have worked on problem root cause and resolution.

Next, you may be working on something new or a problem fix or project related activity. As this role includes support, you may have tickets to resolve requiring detailed knowledge on a range of services hosted on a variety of technology stacks. 

You may draft and raise a change request through the Bank’s formal processes or attend an audit representing technology. You will work collaboratively with architects, security experts, and other engineering teams in your daily work.

As a lead engineer, you may hold learning/master class sessions so that colleagues in your team, and more widely, better understand the tools/applications you support.

Depending on the cover rota you are on, it could mean supporting out of hours activities, e.g. upgrades, releases. For other weeks, you will not be on a rota so can dedicate time to new features and improvements for existing and new services, including toolchain.

Role Requirements

• You are a dedicated DevOps engineer within an Agile environment and meet the minimum criteria. You have a clear collaborative approach to working with others, and keen to share knowledge with colleagues.
• You also understand that the CNI Platform and RTGS is critical to the UK Payments Systems which requires a methodical approach and flexibility to work outside core hours when required.
• You use best practice in Continuous Improvement/Continuous Development and to manage environments - safely promoting code from pre-production to live across a range of technology stacks, helping to develop and test operational procedures as required.
• Work closely with cross-functional teams ensuring teams understand the deployment process, have access to the necessary tools, and are aligned toward the same goals.
• Development and maintenance of technology roadmaps and ensuring the sequence of change for the estate is kept refreshed with the roadmaps.

Minimum Criteria 

We’re looking for someone who has the following key skills and experience:

• Experience of building effective working relationships with others and provide challenge where appropriate 
• Uses initiative and can self-start, upskill in new technologies, with a keen eye for detail
• Researching and developing solutions that expand, modernise or improve the service and technology portfolios, automate IT operations, reduce costs or increase levels of service, to demonstrate technical ownership 
• Practical expertise in complex problem solving
• Demonstrated experience supporting production services 24/7

Essential Criteria

We are interested in hearing from candidates who have the following capabilities:  

• Tooling, e.g. Jenkins, Git, Jira/ Confluence, Ansible.
• IaC, e.g. Ansible, Terraform, Packer
• Containers, e.g. Docker, Podman
• Orchestration, e.g. OCP, Kubernetes
• Operating System e.g. Linux. 
• Monitoring, e.g. Splunk, ELK, 
• Scripting, e.g. Bash, Groovy, Python
• Experience with automated build and deployment, test driven development, continuous integration, and release management tools.
• Experience working across the DevOps lifecycle from design through development, test, and operations.

Desirable Criteria 

• Security: knowledge of standard security practices and technologies, e.g. PKI, secrets management, access controls.
• Workload Automation, e.g. BMC Control-M, IBM TWS
• Virtualisation, e.g. VMWare vSphere / ESXi
• Networks Basics, e.g. DNS, load balancers, proxies, ports and protocols
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software or Electronic Engineering or other related discipline.

You'll be supporting critical Bank services and there will be times where you'll need to work evenings and weekends to perform certain tasks, especially on live systems. Payment for this is in addition to base salary.

How This Role Fits into the Wider Bank 

This role is part of the wider Markets, Banking, Payments & Resolution division within the Bank of England. It’s part of the Technology RTGS Operations – CNI Platforms domain.