Last updated: 28 Aug 2026
Ask for help
If you and your colleagues can’t resolve a technical issue, problem or question, you should try talking with (in this order):
- Your tech lead (TL)
- #govuk-tech-leads
- The senior tech team
Contact Senior Tech
You can ping @govuk-senior-tech-people on Slack, or email govuk-senior-tech-members.
Contact Technical Support of the relevant area of GOV.UK
There are channels for each area of GOV.UK:
#govuk-ask-platform-engineering#govuk-publishing-service-support#govuk-web-support
Escalate to Technical On-Call
There’s a #govuk-technical-on-call channel that can be used to communicate with the on-call engineers in a public forum, in-hours only.
Out of hours, or if you need to escalate urgently in-hours, create an incident in PagerDuty:
- Impacted Service: “GOV.UK”
- Urgency" “High”
- Assignee: “GOV.UK Regular Coverage”)
- Fill out the incident detail and create the incident
This causes the engineer(s) to be paged by PagerDuty.
Ask the developer communities
The GOV.UK developer community (#govuk-developers)
- helps each other with specialised knowledge about specific areas of the platform
- supports each other with issues deploying changes to GOV.UK
- ensures missions are delivered technically in the best and most appropriate way
GOV.UK Platform Engineering team (#govuk-ask-platform-engineering)
- manages the Kubernetes clusters and base images for running GOV.UK applications
- works on long-term improvements to the efficiency, reliability and security of GOV.UK
- supports CI/CD (build, release, rollout) automation
- manages some access control automation such as govuk-user-reviewer
- can offer advice on monitoring and alerting
- can offer design reviews and advice to help build your application for reliability, robustness and low maintenance (especially at the early stages of the software lifecycle)
- can offer advice and assistance with changes such as migrating from one database to another safely and efficiently