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DevOps Lead Engineer - RTGS

Bank of England
1 day ago
Full-time
On-site
Leeds, United Kingdom
£64,480 - £72,540 GBP yearly
Description

Lead DevOps Engineer, Technology Directorate

Permanent

Full time

Location - Leeds

Description  

Work for an organisation steeped in history with a front row seat for the digitalisation of the financial sector, and the rise of FinTec. A core organisational strength, with our people at our centre, Technology enables the Bank of England to deliver its mission by providing a diverse set of technical solutions and platforms. You will be supporting critical systems which underpin the UK economy and be part of a team that’s constantly evolving, just like our industry. 

We take pride in our people, with backgrounds and experiences as diverse as the solutions they provide. You’ll enjoy flexible working opportunities, a strong sense of community and well-being, and a collective mission to promote the good of the people of the UK. All of which add up to make the Bank a hugely rewarding place to work.  

Background 

The Real Time Gross Settlement service (RTGS) and CHAPS, the wholesale payment service, are key to the UK’s economy. Over £775 billion is settled each day across this critical national infrastructure. We are in the process of an exciting and transformational programme to renew RTGS, enhancing not just resilience but also promoting completion and innovation. And we are leading policy work to understand future demand for payments and international efforts to enhance cross-border payments.  

Flexible Working Options

This role is open to flexible working patterns, these may include:

  • A 50% in-office attendance requirement can be spread across the month to accommodate diverse working patterns, such as the flexibility to purchase a weekly train ticket for certain weeks

Opportunities in Leeds

We’re excited to be growing our presence in Leeds, a city we’ve been connected to for nearly 200 years! Our modern, accessible office in the City Centre offers a supportive, flexible working environment. The majority of roles, including this one, are now available in Leeds, giving you the chance to build a meaningful career outside of London while contributing to our mission from a dynamic and growing location. You’ll work collaboratively with London-based colleagues in a hybrid model, with regular opportunities to travel into the London office to meet and connect together in person.

Want to learn more? Discover what makes our Leeds office such a dynamic place to work by visiting our Leeds page for more details.

A Day in the Role

A typical day might start with the team’s stand-up meeting for the current sprint, where you’ll discuss your workload and any blockers. You may be joining from our Leeds office or remotely as part of our hybrid model with London-based peers.

Next, you may have some project work to do or a project meeting to attend, where you’ll be contributing to the maintenance and development of critical national infrastructure through the services you’re responsible for. After that, you may meet with the wider team to discuss strategic planning for future product development, product roadmaps and work to coordinate upcoming activities. If you’re in the office, you could lunch in the canteen with some of your colleagues. In the afternoon, you may have a call or meeting with one of our key vendors, helping to build the relationships and maximise the benefits of our partnerships. Throughout the day you will be working to maintain high standards within the team for support and governance and coaching more junior members of the team.

Job Description  

The Senior DevOps engineer, reporting to a Team Leader, will be accountable for a range of activities undertaken on-premise, including: 

  • Supporting, maintaining and developing changes to the Bank’s solution 
  • Provide coaching and mentoring to colleagues in applying best practice to their work. 
  • Gives guidance to solution designers with regard to product roadmaps and end-to-end architecture of the Domain.  
  • Informs skills and knowledge needed across the domain and works with team leaders to develop the domain wide training plan so the right skills are available to deliver new services. 
  • Supporting and maintaining the tool chain and wider technical estate, 
  • Using best practice in Continuous Improvement/Continuous Development,  
  • Managing Environments - safe promotion of code from pre-production to live including day to day procedures and recovery procedures when required, 
  • Model Agile behaviours in day-to-day activities and promoting Agile best practice. 
  • Working closely with cross-functional teams ensuring teams understand the deployment process, have access to the necessary tools, and is 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. 
  • Provide in and out of hours support to the 24/7 production environment, resolving issues as they arise. This includes start of day and end of day working patterns. 

Minimum Criteria: 

  • Experience with production support, providing support OOH via an on‑call rota, and OOH release support
  • Strong experience with on‑prem Kubernetes / OpenShift deployments
  • Hands‑on contribution to DevOps tooling upgrades, issue resolution, and roadmap‑driven improvements
  • Linux systems administration experience in high‑availability production environments
  • Infrastructure‑as‑Code using Terraform, integrated with CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins)
  • Automation‑first mindset across build, deployment, CI/CD, and release processes
  • Familiar with Observability functions, designing and operating end‑to‑end logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and alerting systems using ELK, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana.
  • Incident‑management leadership — owning major incident response, prioritisation, real‑time coordination, stakeholder communication, and supporting post‑incident reviews and reliability improvements.
  • Thorough understanding of Agile and modern DevOps practices, able to coordinate colleagues and organise priorities, to deliver collaboratively alongside other teams

 Essential Criteria

  • Leadership qualities including experience in mentoring, technical guidance and training, stakeholder collaboration, strategic planning. 
  • Security-first mindset with experience in secure systems and processes. 
  • Operational discipline and governance standards (Maintaining documentation, adhering to and delivering against SLAs, environment management, best practice approach to change delivery).
  • Cloud platform experience (Azure, AWS, or GCP)

Desirable Criteria:

  • Broad experience with financial, accounting or payments systems, products and services supporting the payment services in the financial industry. 

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software or Electronic Engineering or other related discipline. 

  • Relevant industry qualifications for example from Oracle, Redhat, Microsoft, Kafka..

 
Our Approach to Inclusion
The Bank values diversity, equity and inclusion. We play a key role in maintaining monetary and financial stability, and to do that effectively, we believe we need a workforce that reflects the society we serve. 

 
At the Bank of England, we want all colleagues to feel valued and respected, so we're working hard to build an inclusive culture which supports people from all backgrounds and communities to be at their best at work. We celebrate all forms of diversity, including (but not limited to) age, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, race, religion, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status. We believe that it’s by drawing on different perspectives and experiences that we’ll continue to make the best decisions for the public.

 
We welcome applications from individuals who work flexibly, including job shares and part time working patterns. We've also partnered with external organisations to support us in making adjustments for candidates and employees in the recruitment process where they're needed.

 
For most roles where work can be carried out at home, we aim for colleagues to spend half of their time in the office, with a minimum of 40% per month.  Subject to that minimum requirement, individuals and managers should work together to find what works best for them, their team and stakeholders.

 
Finally, we're proud to be a member of the Disability Confident Scheme. If you wish to apply under this scheme, you should check the box in the ‘Candidate Personal Information’ under the ‘Disability Confident Scheme’ section of the application.

 
Salary and Benefits Information
We encourage flexible working, part time working and job share arrangements.  Part time salary and benefits will be on a pro-rated basis as appropriate.
 
Leeds salary £64,480 - £72,540  
 
In addition, we also offer a comprehensive benefits package as detailed below:
  • Currently a non-contributory, career average pension giving you a guaranteed retirement benefit of 1/80th of your annual salary for every year worked. There is the option to increase your pension (to 1/65th) or decrease (to 1/105th) in exchange for salary through our flexible benefits programme each year.  The Bank has the discretion to vary standard accrual rates and dial up and dial down rates at any time and to withdraw dial up and dial down options at any time.
  • A discretionary performance award based on a current award pool.
  • An 8% benefits allowance with the option to take as salary or purchase a wide range of flexible benefits.   
  • 26 days’ annual leave with option to buy up to 12 additional days through flexible benefits. 
  • Private medical insurance and income protection.
National Security Vetting Process
Employment in this role will be subject to the National Security Vetting clearance process (and typically can take between 6 to 12 weeks post offer) and the passing of additional Bank security checks in accordance with the Bank policy.  Further information regarding the vetting and security clearance requirements for the role will be provided to the successful applicant, and information about how the Bank processes personal data for these purposes, is set out in the Bank's Privacy Notice.

 

The Bank of England welcomes applications from all candidates, but as a UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) approved sponsor, we have a responsibility to comply with the Immigration Rules and guidance.  As such, our ability to employ individuals who require sponsorship for immigration purposes is limited.  The Bank cannot guarantee that you and / or the role you are applying for will be eligible for sponsorship and that any application made to UKVI will be successful.  Eligibility will therefore be considered on a case by case basis.


 
The Application Process
Important: Please ensure that you complete the ‘work history’ section and answer ALL the application questions fully. All candidate applications are anonymised to ensure that our hiring managers will not be able to see your personal information, including your CV, when reviewing your application details at the screening stage. It’s therefore really important that you fill out the work history and application form questions, as your answers will form a critical part of the initial selection process.

 
The assessment process will comprise of two interview stages.  

 
This role closes on 29 March 2026

 
Please apply online, ensuring that you complete your work history and answer ALL the application questions fully and in detail as your application will not be considered if all mandatory questions are not fully completed.