About the role

Home Office Digital designs, builds and runs the technology and services that deliver, at scale, some of the UK’s most critical and well-used public services.  The engineering capability plays a critical part in every part of the Home Office in delivering its mission from how we secure the border and control immigration to issues passports and reducing and preventing crime, supporting these services that impact millions of people every year.

The Home Office Digital estate consists of more than 600 systems, enabling critical services such as;

• 13 million Electronic Travel Authorisations since launch
• 3 million visa applications annually
• 130 million border checks each year
• 7 million passport applications annually
• 140 million police checks on people, vehicles, and property

The Deputy Director – Hosting & Cloud Infrastructure, Enterprise Services is a new and critical role within both Enterprise Services and wider Home Office Digital department.  The Home Office Digital portfolio is one of the most complex technology functions within government, with 4,500 resources delivering for more than 300 complex change programmes and maintaining hundreds of mission critical systems.

Enterprise Services is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining digital services and solution for cross cutting functions within the department. Our team is delivering the core technology needed for the department’s future development, designing appropriate solutions, delivering quickly and effectively and making a real difference in achieving wider Home Office Digital and organisational strategies and objectives.

Home Office Digital currently use a combination of “on Premise” and Cloud Based infrastructure to deliver its services including Critical National Infrastructure. The oversight of our current Cloud provision and strategy sits across multiple parts of Home Office Digital. The Deputy Director – Hosting & Cloud Infrastructure will make a significant contribution to the Home Office Digital delivery through the effective creation of strategic Hosting platforms delivery organisation including the delivery of ongoing BAU cloud infrastructure operations. This new organisation will be able to align Home Office cloud and on-premise strategies and ensure we receive value for money across the multiple platforms and providers. A key element of this role is delivery of capability and capacity for the programmes, projects and platform tenants within the Home Office supporting them with the platform functionality required to deliver the new and existing operational services from the systems being developed and operated.

For full description of the role, please check the candidate pack attached at the bottom of the advert.

Job description

Key responsibilities:

• Lead the development and implementation of our on premise and cloud infrastructure strategies, ensuring alignment with organizational goals and objectives.
• Oversee the design, deployment, and management of cloud infrastructure solutions, including public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.
• Ensure the security, scalability, and reliability of cloud infrastructure, implementing best practices and industry standards.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including IT, security, and application development, to ensure seamless integration and operation of cloud services.
• Build, manage and mentor a team of cloud infrastructure engineers, delivery and project managers, delivery partners, service managers, cyber assurance, quality assurance, delivery management, product management and business management staff, providing guidance and support to ensure their professional growth and development.
• Develop and maintain policies, procedures, and documentation related to multi-cloud infrastructure management.
• Stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies in cloud computing; and make recommendations for continuous improvement.
• Manage vendor relationships and negotiate contracts to ensure the best value for the organization.

Person specification

Essential Criteria

The successful candidate will need to demonstrate their knowledge, experience, capability and behavioural approach to a high standard against the following key criteria:

• Having supported an organisation of similar size and scope in its transition to a service provision approach, including first-hand experience of having planned and overseen a full programme life cycle from a legacy technology stack to full operational run state;
• Having delivered multiple complex, high-value programs in a relevant technology landscape, and showing exceptional programme planning and delivery capability, with experience of maximising appropriate frameworks and methodologies in support of delivery;
• Great partnership skills: in particular, a track record of building highly effective partnerships with peers, stakeholders and commercial partners across large-scale organisations;
• Strong financial management experience relating to high value programme delivery. Experience of developing and securing support for associated annual budgets and operating plans.
• Exceptional leader of people, able to build high performing, passionate, delivery-focused teams and support and coach managers to achieve optimum outcomes.

Desirable skills and experience:

• Robust, collaborative and driven, able to work with multiple parties to deliver complex and fast paced programmes of work;
• First-class relationship builder, able to form strong working relationships with a diverse number of stakeholders to communicate and secure support for vision, delivery and rollout;
• Agile and flexible, responds well to change. Can balance objectives and redeploy people and resources as priorities shift; Exceptional verbal and written communication skills. Able to exploit different channels and formats to reach different audiences.

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