Awarded to BAE Systems Applied Intelligence Limited

Start date: Tuesday 6 July 2021
Value: £340,000
Company size: large

Royal Navy Digital Services (Head of Cloud Services)

Web Operations Engineer / Managing Cloud Infrastructure & Associated Services

7 Incomplete applications

7 SME, 0 large

4 Completed applications

3 SME, 1 large

• Published: Wednesday 19 May 2021
• Deadline for asking questions: Friday 21 May 2021 at 11:59pm GMT
• Closing date for applications: Wednesday 26 May 2021 at 11:59pm GMT

Overview

• Specialist role: Web operations engineer
• Summary of the work: A Web Operations Engineer is required by Royal Navy’s Navy Digital Services to provide operational support and build engineering capability in our ashore and afloat Cloud hosting domains. The role will encompass physical & virtual server management including hypervisor management, underpinning our Infrastructure as a Service Cloud solution.
• Latest start date: Monday 21 June 2021
• Expected contract length: 2 years with an option to extend for a further 6 months
• Location: South East England
• Organisation the work is for: Royal Navy Digital Services (Head of Cloud Services)
• Maximum day rate: Up to £900 per day ex VAT. Standard 7.5 hour working day, to include expenses to base location in Portsmouth to 25 mile radius. Additional expenses only paid with prior approval of the Authority outside this zone.

About the work

• Early market engagement: No early market engagement has taken place for this role.
• Who the specialist will work with: As well as working with their immediate peer group the Web Operations Engineer will work with multiple teams in Navy Digital Services including our security team, developers, application support teams and others as required. The engineer will also engage with external 3rd party vendors for support & problem remediation purposes. The Navy Digital Services ecosystem comprises MoD Crown Servants, Military personnel, DSTL researchers and contractors from a variety of industry partners. The Engineer will have no direct management responsibility but may be expected to collaborate with and provide direction to internal stakeholders.
• What the specialist will work on: The Engineer will provide through life operational support and build engineering capability across our shared infrastructure platforms which provide IaaS.; Build/run/decommission of virtualised Linux and Windows servers.; Preventative systems maintenance, including planning & executing patch & firmware management.; Documenting changes including checkpoints, milestones & rollback options.; Pro-active analysis of guests & hypervisor to make tuning & optimal configuration recommendations.; Identifying opportunities for automation in the estate and subsequently writing scripts to realise efficiencies.; Assisting in delivery, coordination & planning of project activities.; Documenting procedures.; Physical installation and decommission of equipment in the fixed and deployed domains.

Work setup

• Address where the work will take place: Royal Navy Digital Services, 3rd Floor, Semaphore Tower, HMNB Portsmouth, PO1 3LT
• Working arrangements: Your core location will be Semaphore Tower in HMNB Portsmouth. For collaboration purposes with your peer community you will be expected to work on-site most of the time with occasional travel as and when required to other Royal Navy locations. Expenses will be within your daily rate for your regular work location. Additional travel expenses will be available should you need to travel to other sites other than your core location, beyond 25 mile radius from Portsmouth. The Royal Navy also supports flexible working.
• Security clearance: As a minimum MoD compatible SC clearance is required at contract start. MoD cannot sponsor clearance.

Additional information

• Additional terms and conditions: All expenses must be pre-agreed the Authority and must comply with the MoD Travel and Subsistence (T&S) Policy.

Skills and experience

Buyers will use the essential and nice-to-have skills and experience to help them evaluate suppliers’ technical competence.

• Essential skills and experience:
  • Demonstrable experience working in an enterprise environment supporting and running on-prem IaaS and PaaS cloud stacks.
  • Demonstrable experience of managing VMware in a large scale multi tenanted environment
  • Demonstrable administrative experience with VMWare Cloud Foundation (VCF), vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T networking and the vRealize suite.
  • Administrative experience of Active directory
  • Proficient experience with at least one of the following OS variants: Windows and/or Ubuntu Linux
  • Proficient experience with at least one of the following management tools: WSUS and/or APT Mirror
  • Experience of security hardening of operating systems to CIS benchmark using CIS-CAT
  • Demonstrable experience & working knowledge of TCP/IP LAN/WAN networking principles
  • Experience of automation tooling with at least two of the following; ansible, terraform, Jenkins
  • Writing code/scripts with at least one of the following languages: bash, python, powershell.
  • Demonstrable experience of administering software version controls systems such as BitBucket or similar
  • Experience managing virtual backup solutions such as Veeam & Data Domain (other enterprise backup solutions considered)
  • Demonstrable experience administering object and network file storage and data archiving
  • Comfortable carrying out technical authoring and documentation such as process & procedure and technical design artefacts.
  • Experience of raising and managing support calls with 3rd party technology vendors service providers.
  • 3rd line problem & incident management experience in an enterprise environment
  • Degree level education within technical discipline
  • As a minimum must be SC cleared
• Nice-to-have skills and experience:
  • Recent experience (<12 months) of working on a UK MoD programme in a technical role
  • Basic experience of Cisco networking and NSX-T integration, ideally Cisco ACI
  • Basic experience and working awareness of security standard JSP604 and/or JSP480
  • Administrative experience with Dell VXrail Hyper-converged infrastructure or equivalent
  • Basic experience configuring and supporting Microsoft IIS version 8.0/10.0
  • Basic experience configuring and supporting Microsoft SQL Server
  • Basic configuration experience of containerisation/micro-segmentation (Docker and/or Kubernetes)
  • Basic experience implementing Protective monitoring SIEM (e.g. Solarwinds or equivalent)
  • Rudimentary awareness of configuration and asset management
  • Basic working knowledge of object and network file storage and data archiving
  • Basic Juniper & Fortinet Firewall experience (design and deploy)
  • Basic experience of core services such as: DNS, NTP, DHCP, certificate management

How suppliers will be evaluated

All suppliers will be asked to provide a work history.

• How many specialists to evaluate: 3
• Cultural fit criteria:
  • Work as part of a team within our organisation and with other suppliers
  • Be transparent and collaborative when making decisions
  • Take responsibility and demonstrate accountability for their work
  • Operate within and promote a no-blame culture that actively encourages stakeholders to learn from mistakes
  • Share knowledge and experience
  • Challenge any practices and behaviours that do not support the culture of Digital Transformation under Navy Digital Services and work constructively to improve them.
• Additional assessment methods: Interview
• Evaluation weighting:

  Technical competence

  70%

  Cultural fit

  10%

  Price

  20%

Questions asked by suppliers

• 1. Will this be assessed as inside IR35?: It is not expected that IR35 will apply. An assessment will be made after the winning supplier has been selected and how the supplier intends to provide the personnel delivering the service.
• 2. Is there a Cyber Risk Assessment?: The Cyber Risk Level is very low. Suppliers that are down selected will be required to complete a SAQ.
• 3. Is there an incumbent supplier in the role?: There is an incumbent delivering this service.
• 4. Would you accept a DV cleared candidate?: Yes, we would accept a candidate with a DV for this role.
• 5. How crucial is it that this individual needs experience in all of the essential fields?: This is a single requirement for one specialist and we are therefore looking for an exceptional supplier with a wide range of expertise to deliver outcomes required. Suppliers/candidates will need to provide one example outlining their experience in each essential criteria.
• 6. How will tenderers be assessed?: Each tenderer will be evaluated and scored 0-3 against responses to essential and nice to have criteria. The tenderers with the three highest total scores will be down selected.; ; Down selected tenderers will be asked to provide a CV and a cultural response, which will be evaluated and scored 0- 3. They will then be provided with a percentage score for the technical, cultural and financial criteria (relative to their scores in comparison to the maximum available score and their rate in comparison to the lowest offered rate).; ; The tenderer with the highest combined score will be the winning tenderer.