Are you passionate about IT, science, technology and engineering?
Do you enjoy building and learning about systems, even outside of work (like homelabbing)?
Got a background in an IT related field (including software)?
Do you have a curious mind?
Do you want to build and maintain IT Lego and get paid to do it?
This may be the role for you!
NPL is looking to build a team to support our scientific projects with their IT system needs.
On a daily basis, you'll be working as part of a team of similar minded and capable IT professionals
to apply your existing software, hardware, networking and security skills to design, build and
maintain IT solutions to meet user needs in a science heavy environment, and blueprint what you
build so it can be reused for other systems.
This is a hands-on role suited towards someone with a passion for IT, wherein you will be expected to make
technical decisions, implement them and own the outcomes, always seeking to improve. We are looking
for someone who can both deliver and design solutions that can be understood, supported and
maintained by others in the wider IT team.
This is not a role for someone who simply implements predefined textbook solutions. You will be
expected to understand scientific requirements, translate them into robust technical designs with a
focus on user needs, and make engineering decisions with a high degree of autonomy. You should be
comfortable operating across both hands-on delivery and solution architecture.
The solutions you design and build will be provided as services by the wider IT
team to our internal customers, and we expect them to be run with formality, expectation, reliability,
predictability and maintainability. To do this, you must have a solid grasp of customer
requirements, technical judgement and excellent communication skills with the customer and the wider IT team.
Skills and Knowledge
You'll be working with a lot of software and hardware in the role. Knowledge of the tooling is
desirable but not essential. You must be comfortable learning unfamiliar technologies quickly.
We'll support this through giving you dedicated time and on-the-job training.
Software and Platforms
- Linux
- Docker
- Python
- Microsoft Azure
- GitLab
- FastAPI
- Ansible
- Node-RED
- Traefik
- Grafana
- Loki
- Prometheus
- MikroTik RouterOS
- BookStack
- Draw.io
- FreshService ITSM
Hardware
- Routers
- Switches
- Firewalls
- Micro Form-Factor PCs
- Single-board computers such as Raspberry Pi
- Mini clusters of NUCs
- Large-scale HDD and SSD storage systems
Nature of the Job
The nature of the job will be to help projects with the underlying IT systems that facilitate
experiments and research, such as:
- Getting data from point A to point B, anywhere in the world.
- Building a sensor acquisition system
- For air quality monitoring?
- For temperature monitoring?
- or factory noise monitoring?
- ... or for any other use case our scientists may come up with!
- Enabling remote control of instruments in the field (sometimes actually in a field)
- Helping build systems to visualise and present data either in post, or during experiments using technologies
like timeseries databases and Grafana.
- Sharing said data (and access) with collaborators and partners.
- Building proof-of-concept systems and demos for viability studies and and project bids.
- Advising scientists and engineers on data processing pipelines.
- Building proof-of-concept instrument automation systems.
- Implementing off-the-shelf containerised applications in an NPL-specific environment with customisations,
IaC configurations, and resilience.
- Helping scientists containerise existing applications and provide and support a platform to host them.
Principles
Core to the role, is the principle of "you build it, you own it" spread across the team. We
adopt a site reliability engineering mindset, approach, and practice to our work. We look to eliminate single
points of failure and avoid those midnight calls of "the service is down" at all costs. From a
technical perspective, this means self-healing services, failovers, redundancy, and high availability are core
to our architecture and operations. From a people perspective, we are all expected to be able to maintain all
the services we have. Nobody going on annual leave should result in an operational problem.
Core to the team, is the principle of individual accountability and shared reward. If you win,
everyone wins. It's in our interests to make sure that everyone on the team can support each other, and the
services we provide. Documentation of processes, solutions, and systems will be the main enabler of other people
in the team, so your written English, ability to communicate visually with diagrams, and author documents in
such a way they can be followed and understood by others is instrumental to the role.
Core to the team, is the principle of learn once, teach many. At NPL, curiosity is valued and
knowledge is shared. When someone discovers a new technology, technique or idea, they're encouraged to bring it
back to the team through demos, toolbox talks, whiteboard sessions and informal workshops. We actively make time
for this because we believe the fastest way for everyone to grow is to learn from each other's real-world
experiences.
Core to NPL, are our company values: Give it our all, Nurture and respect, Keep it simple, Get
connected, and Be bold. These are at the heart of what we do, and they shape the way we interact,
develop our people and celebrate success.
Absolutely vital to the role is to be seen as an expert that your fellow IT colleagues can look up to, seek
advice from and ultimately emulate as an example of a true IT professional.
Previous Experience with a Good Fit
People who may be a good fit for this role could come from a wide range of practical, hands-on backgrounds. This
might include school or college sysadmins who are used to doing a lot with limited resources, SME IT sysadmins
in similar environments, former start-up IT or software professionals looking for greater stability, or people
whose formal career has been outside IT but who have built strong technical capability through curiosity and
hobby projects. Homelabbers, IT security professionals who want to build better systems, people who have moved
across several IT disciplines, and automation engineers or manufacturing IT specialists may all bring the
breadth, adaptability and practical judgement needed to succeed in this role. Don't worry if you're not one of
these, we'll check out your experience and look for similar traits.
Responsibilities
Key responsibilities include:
- Reviewing incoming requests from internal customers and making
determination on whether their requests can be solved using existing capabilities, combinations of existing
capabilities, or something new.
- Designing, documenting, building, sharing, and operating IT
solutions and services, at pace, across the full tech stack from infrastructure to frontend and handing over
long term solutions to operational IT teams.
- Designing, documenting, building, sharing, and operating processes
to support IT solutions to reduce personnel single-point-of-failure.
- Facilitating the transition of services into NPL's IT
operations team where there is a need for them to exist longer than their agreed lifetime.
- Writing and maintaining small pieces of production-quality software
in alignment with enterprise software quality standards.
- Working across NPL functions to gather user stories, analyse
feasibility, and operate in an agile team to deliver value sooner and focus on setting up projects for easy
expansion and evolution.
- Review code of other team members to ensure effectiveness, quality,
and maintainability.
- Writing short whitepapers on technology and solutions to highlight
key benefits, trade-offs, and facilitate knowledge sharing within NPL.
Success in the Role
To be successful in this role:
- You will need excellent communication skills. We really need this one and cannot emphasise enough how
important this is for the success of this role.
- You must be curious, have a thirst for knowledge, and be willing to throw away previous best practices when
better practices are discovered.
- You should have recent, proven experience in designing and building IT systems.
- You should be degree-level educated in computer science, a related discipline, or have equivalent experience
(We are super flexible on this as long as you can demonstrate. We care more about evidence of curiosity,
judgement and delivery than a conventional career path.)
- You must have reasonable knowledge and experience in a programming language (python preferred, though other
languages accepted)
- You must have a strong understanding and demonstrable knowledge of IP networking, TCP/UDP, and layer 5-7
protocols (HTTP, TLS, REST, FTP, SSH)
- You must be meticulous with your eye for detail and quality but know when to apply limits to it.
- Trust and reliability must be core to your work ethic. You are going to be depended upon by many people for
what you do. If you struggle with structure in your work and life, this role isn't for you.
- You need to be able to commute to our Teddington site up to 5 days a week as you will need to be hands on with
hardware, and ideally hold (or be willing to attain) a UK driving license asthere may be an infrequent need
to travel to our hub sites with equipment. There will be opportunities for work-from-home and flexibility
with when you do this.
- You must be willing to join an on-call rota within a year of starting the role.
- You must be able to pass a BPSS security check, obtain SC clearance, and be a UK national.
Development and Career Progression
Throughout the role, you'll not only be learning a huge amount, but will have the opportunity to influence
standards and strategy within IT. This includes shaping the function, participating in CI activities, and
contributing to strategy. You'll have internal career opportunities to specialise into other areas of IT
including Infrastructure, Networks, Cyber Security, and Software Engineering roles. You may also be eligible
for internal promotion based on your delivery. We have an internal career paths initiative that looks at
career roadmaps and documents the skills needed to get there.
Mentoring is also an opportunity we provide, both as a mentee and a mentor. Junior members of staff, early
career, and even those with seniority looking for a career change may be looking for a mentor, and you may
be able to fulfil that role. Similarly if you're looking for options in techncial leadership, strategic
leadership, or a career change, we can support getting you a mentor as well.
The Interview Process
The interview process will be in three stages. Upon being shortlisted, you'll have a screening call first,
followed by a first stage interview. You'll be given a technical challenge to complete along with preparing
a presentation on your architecture and design trade-offs, and a quick demo of your solution. You'll then
have a final stage interview to present this and answer some more technical questions.
Usage of AI Tooling Throughout the Process
Whilst we don't prohibit the use of generative AI for building your solution, you will be expected to
demonstrate a deep understanding of what ever you produce. The role will also demand that you can work on
projects that have strict security and supply chain requirements and may be air-gapped, with no access
to AI tools. We want to know you can do it without relying on AI tech. Copying and pasting code and
boilerplate from the internet is acceptable but be prepared for questions that will probe your understanding
and explaining what and why you have made certain design choices
We actively recruit citizens of all backgrounds, but the nature of our work in specific departments means that nationality, residency and security requirements can be more tightly defined. You will be asked about this throughout the recruitment process. To work at NPL, you will need to obtain BPSS security clearance.
Please note: Applications will be reviewed, and interviews conducted throughout the duration of this advert therefore we may at any time bring the closing date forward. We encourage all interested applicants to apply as soon as practical.