Digital services for UK's largest government department serving millions
DWP Digital operates the tech backbone for the UK's Department for Work and Pensions, serving millions of citizens through systems handling benefits, payments, and identity services. The stack is heavily weighted toward legacy infrastructure (Wintel, Unix, Oracle, COBOL) with active modernization underway: adopting Azure Privileged Identity Management and CyberArk for security, while attempting to transition core systems from COBOL to Java. The hiring profile — two-thirds senior/lead roles, security specialists, and infrastructure engineers — reflects an organization simultaneously running critical legacy platforms and executing large-scale migration projects (payments evolution, PIP transformation, systems consolidation).
Notable leadership hires: Tech Lead, Technical Lead
DWP Digital is the technology division of the UK's Department for Work and Pensions, responsible for digital services delivering support to millions of citizens. The organization operates at substantial scale, maintaining legacy COBOL systems alongside modern cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, OCI), with active projects spanning payments modernization, personal independence payment transformation, Wi-Fi infrastructure rollout, and integration architecture across government departments. The workforce is multidisciplinary, spanning software engineering, infrastructure, security, data science, product, and design roles. Current challenges center on legacy system migration, reducing technical complexity, improving service reliability, and managing security risk across large-scale, mission-critical systems.
Primary stack includes ServiceNow, Microsoft Office, AWS, Azure, OCI, Terraform, Ansible, Python, Oracle Database, Active Directory, and Windows/Linux infrastructure. Legacy systems run COBOL. Currently adopting Azure Privileged Identity Management, CyberArk, and Java while migrating away from Java in core systems.
Top active projects include evolution of payments services, personal independence payment transformation, Wi-Fi rollout, migration of legacy systems to modern solutions, integration with other government departments, technology landscape modernization, and automation playbooks development.
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