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Job Title: Head of Engineering (Health and Disability)

Directorate: Health and Disability, Digital Group, DWP

Grade: This post is at SCS1 level. The salary is Circa £100,000.

Civil servants applying on promotion will usually be appointed to the salary

minimum (£73,000) or within 10% of existing salary.

Location:

DWP Digital hubs are in Birmingham, Blackpool, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Sheffield (note: This role is suitable for hybrid working, which is where an employee works part of the week in their DWP office and part of the week from home).

Please be aware that this role can only be worked in the UK and not overseas.

At DWP, we value diversity and inclusion and actively encourage and welcome applications from everyone, including those that are underrepresented in our workforce.

We consider visible and non-visible disabilities, neurodiversity or learning differences, chronic medical conditions, or mental ill health. Examples include dyslexia, epilepsy, autism, chronic fatigue, or schizophrenia.

If you feel that you may need a reasonable adjustment to be made, would like to discuss your requirements in more detail or require a hard copy of the information, or an alternative format e.g. Audio, Braille or large font please contact Laura Grigg as soon as possible before the closing date to discuss your needs.

About the Role

Do you want to be part of a team that is delivering services to improve the lives of millions of vulnerable people? If so, we need you!

The role of Head of Engineering is instrumental in ensuring that Health and Disability has the technology strategy, architecture, culture and ways of working so that all products and services are secure, resilient, efficient and able to quickly respond to user needs.

Ensuring Health and Disability is aligned to the DWP technical strategy and architecture, enabling the reuse of common components and data to quickly release value to users.

The Senior Leadership Team for Health and Disability are responsible for running and improving critical services that are relied upon by millions of vulnerable people including Personal Independence Payments and Access to Work. They are accountable for both the live running and transformation activities for services. Supporting our Health & Disability portfolio, including playing a key leadership role in the Health Transformation Programme.

Our teams work as part of the Health Transformation Programme to improve the Personal Independence Payment and the Health Assessment services. We are transforming Access to Work, the Disability Living Allowance for Children, and Employer Health and Inclusive Employment services, to ensure all our services work for citizens, our service delivery colleagues, and provide value for money to the taxpayer.

Working in DWP Digital

DWP Digital is progressive in finding new ways to use technology, expertise, and innovation to help those who need it most. We’re changing how we work, transforming digital services for millions of citizens and their needs are at the heart of everything we do.

Health and Disability are on a mission to help people with a health condition or disability get the right support for them. We aim to support the one in six UK adults that have a disability by providing simple, responsive services and timely, accurate and understandable decisions.

The Deputy Director for Engineering is responsible for:

As a member of the Health and Disability Senior Leadership Team, working closely with Delivery Leads, the Deputy Director for Engineering will:

• Support the delivery of the Health Transformation Programme and wider Health and Disability portfolio.
• Set strategic direction for technology and ensure this aligns with the wider Health and Disability mission as well as the technical strategy of the department and government.
• Be accountable for the Technical Architecture, Infrastructure and live service across Health and Disability.
• Ensure that technology and infrastructure in Health and Disability is secure, resilient, and able to quickly respond to changes in user need.
• Carefully prioritise work to avoid and reduce technical debt, developing strategies to retire or replace systems when needed.
• Lead, build, inspire and motivate a team of technical architects and engineers.
• Senior leaders across the organisation, including directly with Senior Responsible Officers (SROs) of major change programmes.
• Embed engineers and empower product teams but ultimately be accountable for technology decisions.
• Build collaborative relationships with a wide range of stakeholders across DWP Digital and wider programmes to influence strategy and ways of working to put the user at the heart of the organisation.
• Lead the engineering and architectural communities in Health & Disability and build and execute the engineering strategy to facilitate the delivery of the vision of the team.
• Drive a comprehensive and cohesive engineering strategy across a large-scale agile delivery programme, including standards on accessibility, engineering, architecture, testing and deployment; building a DevOps culture across all teams.
• Guide a team of technology professionals to create and maintain services, targeting zero production hours lost whilst continuing to deliver new functionality into the Health and Disability service.
• Oversee security to make sure Health and Disability has robust security controls and risk procedures in place to prevent service breaches.
• Overall line management responsibilities for team members from the architecture and engineering job roles.
• Deliver within headcount and budget, always ensuring value for money for the taxpayers.

Essential Criteria for the role which will be used to assess your application, alongside Success Profiles:

To succeed in this role, you will be a naturally inspiring and collaborative leader, with relevant digital experience gained within the public or commercial sector, in the following key areas:

• A high level of technical experience and knowledge gained working with large scale, complex and rapidly changing digital organisation.
• Leading large, technically focused, multi-disciplinary agile teams in building exemplary digital products and services of scale and complexity.
• Extensive knowledge gained across the whole technical stack, from infrastructure level through to applications, including integration with and transition from, legacy systems.
• Proven track record of successfully implementing a DevOps culture within multi-disciplinary teams, building their capability and capacity to meet the demands of a dynamic user and customer base.
• Running large scale applications in the production environment, including incident management and recovery.

Success Profiles

The Civil Service recruits using Success Profiles. This means for each role we advertise, we consider what you will need to demonstrate in order to be successful.

This gives us the best possible chance of finding the right person for the job, drives up performance and improves diversity and inclusivity.

Throughout the application process we will be considering the following Behaviours:

• Leadership
• Managing a Quality Service
• Working Together
• Seeing the Bigger Picture

How to apply

To apply for this post, you will need to complete the online application process outlined below:

This should be submitted no later than 23:55pm on 24th April 2023.

A CV setting out your career history, with key responsibilities and achievements. Please ensure you have provided reasons for any gaps within the last two years;

Three statements (max. 500 words each) answering the below questions, explaining why you want to work for DWP in this role; how you consider your personal skills, qualities and experience providing evidence of your suitability for the role, with reference to the essential criteria in the person specification:

The full campaign pack for this role is here: Candidate Pack – Head of Engineering for Health and Disability please read through the entire pack which will contain all the necessary information to support your application along with the timelines of the recruitment process.

Please note that when you make your application online you will be asked to complete Diversity Monitoring information too.