Job overview

A Lead Systems Engineer is typically the technical lead for multidisciplinary teams delivering and operating multiple components within a system.

We work on national, highly available distributed systems built and run by in house teams. These systems can differ in size, scale and purpose, but an example system would:

• Have a round-the-clock requirement to be available to a level of 99.9% or higher
• Have a national-scale impact on unavailability, and cope with the load associated with a daily transactional user-base of more than one hundred thousand people
• Adopt modern Cloud best-practices and open standards to support interoperability and re-usability
• Achieve high availability through operational simplicity.
• Provide flexible low-cost horizontal scale out to handle expected and unexpected variations in load.
• Handle the architectural trade-offs necessary to avoid logical bottlenecks
• Provide security controls appropriate for the storage of large volumes of sensitive data - hundreds of millions of records and documents.
• Have a direct clinical impact on patient care.

These national critical systems enable safe, reliable identification across health and care, supporting services used by hundreds of thousands of people every day.

We have an exciting opportunity to join multidisciplinary product teams in Products and Platforms across a range of national services.

Main duties of the job

As a Lead Systems Engineer, you will:

• Develop, build and operate national, highly available distributed systems within NHS England.
• Work within and contribute to NHS England engineering principles.
• Take technical ownership across the system space, including applications, environments, infrastructure and networks, pipelines, and operational tools.
• Collaborate with peers to solve engineering problems and raise engineering standards across the organisation. This is a significant part of the Lead Systems Engineer role, in the order of 25% of time.
• Drive engineering maturity within the team.
• Coach and mentor colleagues to support team development.

Candidates will need to demonstrate experience of the following

• Experience working on a complex application across all layers of the stack including application, infrastructure, CI/CD, testing, monitoring and alerting etc.
• Implementing quality-focused development practices and testing techniques
• Experience of taking a lead role, for example driving design decisions, managing stakeholders effectively, and providing technical leadership.
• Experience of driving and implementing improvements within a product or team.
• Working within a team to deliver software in a collaborative way, including coaching and mentoring colleagues to develop the team and contribute to a strong engineering culture.

Working for our organisation

NHS England has a wide range of statutory functions, responsibilities and regulatory powers. These are focused on supporting the wider NHS to deliver high quality care, as well as doing those things that are best done once for the whole NHS.

Our staff bring expertise across clinical, operational, commissioning, technology, data science, cyber security, software engineering, education, and commercial specialisms — enabling us to design and deliver high-quality NHS services.

In March 2025, the Government announced that NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care will increasingly merge functions, ultimately leading to NHS England being fully integrated into the department. 

If you currently work within the NHS and if successful at interview, we will initiate an Inter Authority Transfer (IAT) via the Electronic Staff Record (ESR). This retrieves key data from your current or previous NHS employer to support onboarding, including competency status, Continuous Service Dates (CSD), and annual leave entitlement. You may opt out at any stage of the process.

Colleagues with a contractual office base are expected to spend, on average, at least 40% of their time working in our offices.

Staff recruited from outside the NHS will usually be appointed at the bottom of the pay band.

We cannot offer visa sponsorship for any vacancies.