13940 - Lead Site Reliability Engineer
| Posting date: | 20 January 2026 |
|---|---|
| Salary: | £71,381 to £85,257 per year |
| Additional salary information: | The national salary range is £71,381 - £80,419, London salary range is £75,674 - £85,257. Your salary will be dependent on your base location |
| Hours: | Full time |
| Closing date: | 01 February 2026 |
| Location: | UK |
| Remote working: | Hybrid - work remotely up to 3 days per week |
| Company: | Ministry of Justice |
| Job type: | Permanent |
| Job reference: | 13940 |
Summary
Lead Site Reliability Engineer
Location: National*
Closing Date: 1st February
Interviews: expected w/c 16th February
Grade: 6
(MoJ candidates who are on a specialist grade, will be able to retain this grade on lateral transfer)
Salary:
London: £75,674- £87,875 which may include an allowance up to £12,201
National: £71,381- £83,700 which may include an allowance up to £12,319
Working pattern: Full-time, part-time, flexible working
Contract Type: Permanent
Vacancy number: 13940
*We offer a hybrid working model, allowing for a balance between remote work and time spent in your local office. Office locations can be found ON THIS MAP
The Role
We’re recruiting for a Lead Site Reliability Engineer here at Justice Digital, to lead our site reliability engineering team in HMPPS Digital.
Within the team, you will be helping to build and maintain platforms that underpin the digital services we are delivering. You will work closely with development teams, cloud platforms teams, live service teams and security teams to help maintain and develop services. We use modern best practices like DevOps and agile, use cloud native architectures and prefer modern open-source tools.
This role aligns against the Lead DevOps Engineer role from the Government Digital and Data Framework.
About Us:
At Justice Digital, we're dedicated to leveraging technology to drive impactful change across the justice system. As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer, you'll play a pivotal role in enhancing access to justice and improving outcomes for users through innovative digital solutions.
Responsibilities: You’ll be working on our acclaimed open-source public services, with user needs at the heart of everything, helping us transform Government for the future. Working as part of a multi-disciplinary team, you’ll be helping define how we do what we do and making sure that our systems are built to be changed rapidly, leading teams of site reliability engineer specialists across teams.
Collaboration: You’ll collaborate closely with software developers, product managers, designers, delivery managers, technical architects and content specialists who share our vision of leveraging technology to transform government services.
Our Tech Stack
Technologies: We use a diverse range of technologies, and we’re seeking individuals who specialise in one or more and are eager to learn new languages and frameworks. Our tech stack includes:
○ Cloud infrastructure: AWS
○ Infrastructure as code: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation
○ Containerisation: Docker
○ CI/CD deployments: GitHub Actions, Concourse, CircleCI
○ Application code: Python, Ruby, JavaScript
Learning and Support: Once part of Justice Digital, we'll support you in mastering our tech stack, regardless of your current experience. Explore our GitHub for insights into our technologies and the services we develop and maintain.
Our Community: Join over 150 experienced software and site reliability engineers who form our vibrant engineering community across the MoJ. You’ll have opportunities to mentor junior colleagues and participate in informal support networks with peers. We encourage active engagement in shaping our engineering culture and community.
Career Development: We take pride in our supportive and effective line management. Your skills are highly valued, and we’re committed to helping you expand them within the civil service. You'll have opportunities to move between teams or departments, explore new technologies, and take on increased responsibilities aligned with your career goals.
Explore Further: Dive deeper into our work and culture by visiting our Developer Blog and Justice Digital Blog.
Key Responsibilities:
As a Lead DevOps engineer, you will:
Provide strong leadership to set the future site reliability engineering strategy for a fast paced, demanding environment
Take ownership of improving the site reliability engineering capability across the large number of diverse development and engineering teams
Work with the Head of Profession, the wider engineering leadership team and development operations community to ensure we build maintainable and sustainable digital products across Digital & Technology
Work closely with the Service Owner to ensure provision of a high-quality, cost-effective service.
Stay up to date with, and lead the creation of standards around development operations practices and techniques to best enable our teams to consistently deliver at pace
Mentor the site reliability engineers, through the design and implementation of solutions whilst ensuring alignment with the organisations standards, identifying opportunities for collaboration where appropriate.
Collaborate with technical architects and software developers to build and maintain a strong site reliability culture
Advocate user-centric, agile approaches which focus on rapid, effective delivery of high-quality digital services
Assist in transforming technical requirements into automated processes including managing tools and testing environments, central code control, maintaining development standards and writing software that automates systems
Support site reliability team in delivering automated software components that form part of a tool chain and transform technical requirements into automated processes
Work collaboratively and supportively with other local professions leads to identify and resolve technical, operational and business issues preventing delivery.
Support sharing of methods and technologies across teams, government, and the industry by helping to organise events
Help publicise our achievements and learning, and celebrate our successes through blog posts, social media and/ or speaking at events/ conferences
Location: National*
Closing Date: 1st February
Interviews: expected w/c 16th February
Grade: 6
(MoJ candidates who are on a specialist grade, will be able to retain this grade on lateral transfer)
Salary:
London: £75,674- £87,875 which may include an allowance up to £12,201
National: £71,381- £83,700 which may include an allowance up to £12,319
Working pattern: Full-time, part-time, flexible working
Contract Type: Permanent
Vacancy number: 13940
*We offer a hybrid working model, allowing for a balance between remote work and time spent in your local office. Office locations can be found ON THIS MAP
The Role
We’re recruiting for a Lead Site Reliability Engineer here at Justice Digital, to lead our site reliability engineering team in HMPPS Digital.
Within the team, you will be helping to build and maintain platforms that underpin the digital services we are delivering. You will work closely with development teams, cloud platforms teams, live service teams and security teams to help maintain and develop services. We use modern best practices like DevOps and agile, use cloud native architectures and prefer modern open-source tools.
This role aligns against the Lead DevOps Engineer role from the Government Digital and Data Framework.
About Us:
At Justice Digital, we're dedicated to leveraging technology to drive impactful change across the justice system. As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer, you'll play a pivotal role in enhancing access to justice and improving outcomes for users through innovative digital solutions.
Responsibilities: You’ll be working on our acclaimed open-source public services, with user needs at the heart of everything, helping us transform Government for the future. Working as part of a multi-disciplinary team, you’ll be helping define how we do what we do and making sure that our systems are built to be changed rapidly, leading teams of site reliability engineer specialists across teams.
Collaboration: You’ll collaborate closely with software developers, product managers, designers, delivery managers, technical architects and content specialists who share our vision of leveraging technology to transform government services.
Our Tech Stack
Technologies: We use a diverse range of technologies, and we’re seeking individuals who specialise in one or more and are eager to learn new languages and frameworks. Our tech stack includes:
○ Cloud infrastructure: AWS
○ Infrastructure as code: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation
○ Containerisation: Docker
○ CI/CD deployments: GitHub Actions, Concourse, CircleCI
○ Application code: Python, Ruby, JavaScript
Learning and Support: Once part of Justice Digital, we'll support you in mastering our tech stack, regardless of your current experience. Explore our GitHub for insights into our technologies and the services we develop and maintain.
Our Community: Join over 150 experienced software and site reliability engineers who form our vibrant engineering community across the MoJ. You’ll have opportunities to mentor junior colleagues and participate in informal support networks with peers. We encourage active engagement in shaping our engineering culture and community.
Career Development: We take pride in our supportive and effective line management. Your skills are highly valued, and we’re committed to helping you expand them within the civil service. You'll have opportunities to move between teams or departments, explore new technologies, and take on increased responsibilities aligned with your career goals.
Explore Further: Dive deeper into our work and culture by visiting our Developer Blog and Justice Digital Blog.
Key Responsibilities:
As a Lead DevOps engineer, you will:
Provide strong leadership to set the future site reliability engineering strategy for a fast paced, demanding environment
Take ownership of improving the site reliability engineering capability across the large number of diverse development and engineering teams
Work with the Head of Profession, the wider engineering leadership team and development operations community to ensure we build maintainable and sustainable digital products across Digital & Technology
Work closely with the Service Owner to ensure provision of a high-quality, cost-effective service.
Stay up to date with, and lead the creation of standards around development operations practices and techniques to best enable our teams to consistently deliver at pace
Mentor the site reliability engineers, through the design and implementation of solutions whilst ensuring alignment with the organisations standards, identifying opportunities for collaboration where appropriate.
Collaborate with technical architects and software developers to build and maintain a strong site reliability culture
Advocate user-centric, agile approaches which focus on rapid, effective delivery of high-quality digital services
Assist in transforming technical requirements into automated processes including managing tools and testing environments, central code control, maintaining development standards and writing software that automates systems
Support site reliability team in delivering automated software components that form part of a tool chain and transform technical requirements into automated processes
Work collaboratively and supportively with other local professions leads to identify and resolve technical, operational and business issues preventing delivery.
Support sharing of methods and technologies across teams, government, and the industry by helping to organise events
Help publicise our achievements and learning, and celebrate our successes through blog posts, social media and/ or speaking at events/ conferences