Overview
Distinguished Engineer – Contact Engagement Platform – Bristol
About the job
Job summary
This is a unique opportunity to join HMRC as a Distinguished Engineer, providing technical leadership for one of the most critical set of platforms in the organisation. In this role, you will shape and deliver the engineering strategy for the Contact Engagement Platform, driving innovation, improving developer experience, and ensuring our technology enables seamless, secure, and scalable customer interactions. You’ll act as a key bridge between engineering and business strategy, influencing senior stakeholders and aligning technical delivery with HMRC’s broader transformation goals.
Job description
- Provide Technical Leadership: As the senior technical leader within the Software Development and Management Practice, you’ll be accountable for developing and delivering the engineering technical strategy for the Contact Engagement Platform. You’ll inspire and support engineering teams to deliver high-quality work on time. You’ll work with a community of suppliers and permanent engineers and set performance expectations for both.
- Drive Innovation and Strategy: The role requires you to “think big” on technology, drive innovation within platforms, and ensure the use of the right technologies to increase speed to market and productivity, while maintaining security and reliability. You’ll also be responsible for the “Developer Experience” (DevEx), ensuring engineers are supported within the platforms.
- Bridge the Gap: You will connect the engineering functions of the Chief Engineering and Platform Office (CEPO) and the Customer-facing Digital and Platform Office (CDPO), aligning technical requirements with appropriate roadmaps. You will also provide robust challenge and support to the Enterprise Architecture functions. You will help our engineering platforms ‘get out of the way’ of service teams.
- Engage and Influence Stakeholders: This is an executive-level engineering role where you will work with Director Generals and their Senior Leadership Teams. You’ll provide leadership to align business delivery with platform architecture and services, engage with other IT leaders, and represent HMRC’s engineering capability to the wider government community.
- Motivate and Nurture: You will help develop talent pipelines feeding into the Contact Engagement Platform and wider, developing junior engineers and supporting pathways for school leavers and graduates. You will represent the Government Digital and Data (GDaD) profession schemes within HMRC and across other Government departments, and you will champion ‘Engineering’ as a first-class occupation within the Civil Service.
- Practical Application of Skills: This is a hands-on role, you won’t be cutting code every day, but you will fully understand a modern Software Development Life Cycle and how to apply it properly. When appropriate you will be joining pairs and mobbing on complex problems.
Person specification
- Exceptional Leadership and Influence: You will be an excellent leader and manager with a proven track record of building, leading, and influencing highly skilled technical teams and driving cultural change. You must be able to influence senior stakeholders, providing clear advice to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Strategic & Hands-on Technical Expertise: Due to the nature of this role, you must be both strategic and hands-on. This includes expert-level knowledge in building and maintaining software solutions in a multi-cloud environment, a deep understanding of modern DevSecOps and Secure Software Development Lifecycle methodologies, and experience with continuous delivery and running systems at scale. You will be able to embrace modern and cutting edge approaches and used evidence based decision making in their adoption.
- Proven Innovation and Technical Foresight: You must constantly scan for new technologies, understand how they can solve business problems, and be able to create business cases and lead proof-of-concept projects. Experience in containerised application development, building engineering reference architectures, and capitalising on AI solutions to improve platforms is essential.
- Strong Communication & Interpersonal Skills: The ability to communicate a technical vision to all levels of management, business partners, and technical staff is critical. You must be able to secure consensus from a wide group of stakeholders and demonstrate expert-level interaction with senior leadership.
Benefits
Alongside your salary of £81,000, HM Revenue and Customs contributes £23,465 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.
For benefits please see the Candidate Pack attached.
Things you need to know
Selection process details
For Selection Process details please see the Candidate Pack attached
Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.
This role has a minimum assignment duration of 3 years. An assignment duration is the period of time a Senior Civil Servant is expected to remain in the same post to enable them to deliver on the agreed key business outcomes. The assignment duration also supports your career through building your depth of expertise.
As part of accepting this role you will be agreeing to the expected assignment duration set out above. This will not result in a contractual change to your terms and conditions. Please note this is an expectation only, it is not something which is written into your terms and conditions or indeed which the employing organisation or you are bound by. It will depend on your personal circumstances at a particular time and business needs, for example, would not preclude any absence like family friendly leave. It is nonetheless an important expectation, which is why we ask you to confirm you agree to the assignment duration set out above.
Security
Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is security check (opens in a new window).
See our vetting charter (opens in a new window).
People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.
Nationality requirements
This job is broadly open to the following groups:
- UK nationals
- nationals of the Republic of Ireland
- nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
- nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
- nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
- individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
- Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service
Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)
Working for the Civil Service
The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.
We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission’s recruitment principles (opens in a new window).
The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.
The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.
Diversity and Inclusion
The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan (opens in a new window) and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (opens in a new window).
