A day in the life of an infrastructure engineer 

Dan is an infrastructure engineer in Technology Services. After starting his career in admin, he has moved into a technical role in the tooling team.  

Tech career curiosity 

I fell into engineering  – it was never the plan. I joined DWP Digital with zero digital skills about 6 years ago in an admin role. Through being curious, proactive, and getting to know the right people, I learned more about what I wanted to do, and made the move towards increasingly technical roles. That culminated in where I am today working in the tooling team.     

A day in tooling  

DWP Digital offer hybrid working, so I go into the office 40% of the time. I co-ordinate my office days with my team so that we’re all in together. It makes a huge difference to be able to collaborate in-person.   

We kick off the day with a stand-up meeting to discuss what we’re all working on, then I get on with my engineering tasks. My role as an infrastructure engineer involves designing, building, managing, and supporting the infrastructure services that underpin all internal user services and services to the public.

My role is based in the tooling team, and we manage the Splunk data platform. We work with teams across the whole of Digital and Security to get data from their service, application, or infrastructure into the platform.  

We do this for IT operations purposes such as making sure their service is running fine and troubleshooting any issues. Secondly, to help keep DWP safe and prevent possible fraud or misuse.  

I usually have a wander around the city at lunchtime and then continue working on my tasks in the afternoon. If it’s a Thursday or Friday, my team may head out for food or drinks together. 

The people behind the products  

There are two things I love about my job: the modern technology and the people. The stereotypes around the Civil Service being out-dated couldn’t be more wrong. What we’re doing in the tooling team with industry leading vendors such as Splunk, Cribl and Dynatrace is cutting edge. Secondly, the people I work with are talented, like-minded, caring and generally good fun to be around. It’s a great combination.    

We’re there to deliver critical services and help people, which I really love. What we do has a real impact on society – you aren’t there to put money in shareholders pockets. It’s the opposite.    

There is so much more to working in DWP Digital than just doing your day job. There are many other beneficial initiatives and networks to get involved in that have massively expanded my personal network and skillset.   

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