System Engineer (Cloud Engineer)
Job summary
The System Engineer (Cloud Engineer) will be working on national, highly available distributed systems being built and run across NHS England. The systems can differ in size, scale and purpose, but an example system would:
- Have a round-the-clock requirement to be available to a level of 99.9%or higher
- Have a national-scale impact on unavailability, and cope with the load associated with a daily transactional user-base of more than onehundred thousand people
- Adopt modern Cloud best-practices and open standards to support interoperability and re-usability with security first principles.
- Achieve high availability through operational simplicity by lowering mean-time-to-repair rather than increasing mean-time-between-failurenot contract management; by focussing on engineering excellence.
- Provide flexible low-cost horizontal scale out to handle expected and unexpected variations in load
- Handle the architectural trade-offs necessary to avoid logical bottlenecks
- Provide security controls appropriate for the storage of large volumes of sensitive data - hundreds of millions of records and documents
- Have a direct clinical impact on patient care and/or health research
- System Engineers (Cloud Engineers) could be a tech lead for a squad delivering components for national systems. Or working with peers on larger scale projects.
Main duties of the job
System Engineers (Cloud Engineers) are responsible for developing in the "system" space, which includes the application but is broader: it means the application, the environments, infrastructure & networks on which it runs, the pipelines that build, deploy and test it, and the tools that allow the team to operate it (e.g. monitoring & alerting tools, code repositories, etc). NHS England utilises Agile, Lean and DevOps delivery practices, with an emphasis on Internet facing services using Cloud and Open Source technology to create large scale national solutions for the NHS.
About us
NHS England has a wide range of statutory functions, responsibilities and regulatory powers. These are focused on supporting the wider NHS to deliver high quality care, as well as doing those things that are best done once for the whole NHS.
Our staff bring expertise across clinical, operational, commissioning, technology, data science, cyber security, software engineering, education, and commercial specialisms -- enabling us to design and deliver high-quality NHS services.
In March 2025, the Government announced that NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care will increasingly merge functions, ultimately leading to NHS England being fully integrated into the department.
If you currently work within the NHS and if successful at interview, we will initiate an Inter Authority Transfer (IAT) via the Electronic Staff Record (ESR).This retrieves key data from your current or previous NHS employer to support onboarding, including competency status, Continuous Service Dates (CSD), and annual leave entitlement. You may opt out at any stage of the process.
Colleagues with a contractual office base are expected to spend, on average, at least 40% of their time working in our offices.
Staff recruited from outside the NHS will usually be appointed at the bottom of the pay band.
We cannot offer visa sponsorship for any vacancies.
Job description
Job responsibilities
You can find further details about the role, including key responsibilities and accountabilities, and person specification in the attached Job Description and other supporting documents.
Please ensure your supporting statement includes demonstratable evidence and specific examples on how you meet the criteria for each of the key skills specified. This will be used in both the shortlisting and interview processes.
Important: Please be aware there are residency requirements you need to meet:
To meet National Security Vetting requirements, SC clearances require 5 years continuous UK residency. In certain cases, this can be reduced to three years continuous UK residency, with additional overseas checks for the previous two years.
Candidates who were posted abroad for service with HM Government, Armed Forces or within a UK government role - will still be considered.
Please make sure you meet these requirements before applying for this role.
You dont need to have SC already, however, failure to achieve the requirements for SC after offer, will result in the job offer being withdrawn.
For further advice please check https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/united-kingdom-security-vetting-clearance-levels/national-security-vetting-clearance-levels#security-check-scor contact england.securityvetting@nhs.net.
The post of System Engineer (Cloud Engineer) has been awarded a Recruitment and Retention Premia (RRP) in response to current labour market conditions. In recognition of this, the role attracts an additional monthly RRP payment equal to 13% per annum.
Please be aware that RRP is none contractual and subject to review.
Person Specification
Skills
- Designs, codes, tests, corrects and documents large and/or complex programs and program modifications from supplied specifications using agreed standards and tools, to achieve a well-engineered result.
- Takes part in reviews of own work and leads reviews of colleagues' work.
Knowledge
- Shares knowledge with others in team by presenting back to the team on technical investigations, and areas of technical specialism.
Stakeholder Management
- Capable of acting as a single technical point of contact for defined stakeholder groups.
Qualifications
- Qualified to Master's degree level in a suitable technical, scientific or mathematical subject (or equivalent professional experience)
Experience
- Experience and understanding of operational considerations (PARRISSS) as part of system architecture & design, namely Performance, Availability, Recoverability, Reliability, Integrity, Security, Scalability and Serviceability
- Experienced in identifying and documenting both functional and non-functional requirements for a large application or suite of applications
Disclosure and Barring Service Check
This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.
Employer details
Employer name
NHS England
Address
Leeds - Wellington Place/London - Wellington House
Leeds / London
LS1 4AP
United Kingdom
Employer's website
https://www.england.nhs.uk/about/working-for/