Overview

Digital delivery is a cornerstone of the NHS's 10-year plan, aiming to revolutionise healthcare. Digital transformation is expected to improve patient outcomes and alleviate the burden on healthcare professionals by reducing paperwork and enabling personalised care. We have an exciting opportunity for an experienced systems engineer to join our Digital Citizen Portfolio as Head of Systems Engineering. The successful candidate will primarily focus on leading the engineering for the NHS app, however they will also have responsibility for other parts of the digital citizen national channels which includes the NHS.uk website. NHS.uk is a widely used medical resource for providing guidance to citizens across the UK. The NHS App is a mobile-native app built with Swift and Kotlin. Some other technologies used in this team include Azure, Terraform, and C# for the backend services used by the mobile app. The NHS App is used by millions of citizens daily and will enable patients to book appointments, manage medications, and access their medical records.

Responsibilities

• Technical leadership and delivery of national, highly available mobile apps and distributed systems, adhering to NHS England's engineering principles
• Working with key internal and external partners and stakeholders to develop the architecture and design of mobile apps and systems
• Ensuring continued availability, resilience, and cost effectiveness of existing mobile apps and systems
• Maintaining service security, providing security controls for large volumes of highly sensitive data
• Building and leading high-performing teams (a multi-team structure comprising 100+ engineers) based on a culture of collaboration, driving continuous improvement through Agile, Lean and DevOps delivery
• Mentoring and coaching staff in your team
• Engaging in peer-to-peer collaboration to solve engineering problems and drive organisation-wide engineering standards, including forming and leading communities of practice
• Working with peers to define the organisation's engineering strategy, with focus on mobile app development standards and growing mobile app development communities of practice
• Presenting highly technical and complex information to non-technical audiences
• Acting as Subject Matter Expert for systems design, delivery, and operation, including with external suppliers/partners

Qualifications and Skills

• Deep native mobile expertise - strong technical grounding in iOS and/or Android architecture, native capabilities, security, biometrics, and App Store/Play Store compliance
• Implementing system security and resilience techniques, controls and practices
• Experience working on highly available systems
• Providing technical leadership for key systems
• Desirable: experience in distributed mobile delivery across multiple engineering teams
• Hands-on full-stack engineering experience, including cloud infrastructure
• Mentoring/coaching team members
• Experience managing senior/non-technical stakeholders
• Agile delivery

Additional Information

• Core competencies explored at interview: Influence, Knowledge, and understanding evolving customer needs
• Secondments: NHS internal applicants may be offered a secondment; agreement should be obtained from their employer prior to submitting the application
• Recruitment and Retention Premium (RRP) of 30% per annum for this role (non-contractual and subject to review)
• Other notes: Government and NHS England ongoing organisational changes and potential inter-authority transfer considerations