Mid-Senior Developer

This role is available across our London, Bristol and Manchester locations

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is the digital centre of government. We are responsible for setting, leading and delivering the vision for a modern digital government.

Our priorities are to drive a modern digital government, by:

• joining up public sector services
• harnessing the power of AI for the public good
• strengthening and extending our digital and data public infrastructure
• elevating leadership and investing in talent
• funding for outcomes and procuring for growth and innovation
• committing to transparency and driving accountability

We are home to the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (I.AI), the world-leading GOV.UK and at the forefront of coordinating the UK’s geospatial strategy and activity. We lead the Government Digital and Data function and champion the work of digital teams across government.

We’re part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and employ more than 1,000 people all over the UK, with hubs in Manchester, London and Bristol.

The Government Digital Service is where talent translates into impact. From your first day, you’ll be working with some of the world’s most highly-skilled digital professionals, all contributing their knowledge to make change on a national scale.

Join us for rewarding work that makes a difference across the UK. You'll solve some of the nation’s highest-priority digital challenges, helping millions of people access services they need

The GOV.UK One Login Programme represents a once in a generation opportunity to simplify and widen access to all digital government services. Sitting at the heart of the government, we are building one simple, safe and secure way for users to log in and prove who they are that will work across all government services.

Effective identity assurance is central to digital transformation and GOV.UK One Login enables people to prove who they are online, with the necessary level of confidence to access and use particular services. Our technology stack runs on AWS, using serverless compute and storage products. Backend services are written in TypeScript/Node.js and JVM technologies. Web applications also use TypeScript.

The GOV.UK One Login programme is full of talented and passionate people who are focussed on delivering high quality products for services and individuals. The right person will join a well motivated and multi-disciplined delivery team working to deliver on our commitments and roadmap. We are an ambitious and visionary team so if you want to be at heart of this, have a background in software delivery and are used to working in a scaled agile environment then this could be the place for you!

Sometimes described as the most strategic programme in government, GOV.UK One Login represents a once in a career opportunity to work on a software product that will be used by the majority of the people living in the UK. It’s a fast paced, dynamic and challenging environment that is sure to offer you career satisfaction as well as a chance to develop and enhance your skills.

GOV.UK One Login is being designed and built for the many, not the few. It will unite services across government, revolutionising the way government departments interact digitally with users. One Login will deliver an accessible and essential function that will change lives and help millions.

If this sounds like the next role for you on your career journey then we’d love to hear from you.

As a Developer on GOV.UK One Login, you’ll:

• work as part of a multi-disciplinary agile team, getting involved with every part of the lifecycle of a service, from user research to continuously deploying code to production in our AWS environments
• build robust, performant Java and/or TypeScript services to serve a variety of citizen and government needs, taking responsibility for the quality of code you produce
• implement tooling and automation to support development, operation, reliability, security and continuous improvement of the systems you work on
• support the live operation of the services we run, and participate in out-of-hours support rotas where necessary - you'll be paid an allowance, and a further hourly payment, for any duties you perform when on call
• share your work and the things you’ve learned through blog posts and show and tells, with the option of presenting at conferences and meetups
• use your learning and development budget to develop your career
• help recruit other developers and, where appropriate, get involved with sifting and interviewing

Person specification

The skills we would expect a Developer to have:

• an awareness of technologies used for cloud based web applications, such as databases, backups, CDNs, containerisation, and serverless computing
• familiarity with modern software development approaches such as automated testing, test driven development (TDD), continuous integration, pair programming, code review, observability and version control
• experience working in a collaborative environment, and an understanding of the benefits of agile and multi-disciplinary approaches

In addition to the above, Senior Developers will also:

• have experience supporting others in applying modern development standards
• have experience in management, helping colleagues with their career development and coaching more junior staff members

If you meet a few of those criteria but think that you might not meet every last one then don’t let that stop you from submitting an application.

Please note that this role requires SC clearance, which would normally need 5 years’ UK residency in the past 5 years. This is not an absolute requirement, but supplementary checks may be needed where individuals have not lived in the UK for that period. This may mean your security clearance (and therefore your appointment) will take longer or, in some cases, not be possible.

In order to assist candidates with this role, we will be holding a virtual recruitment event on Wednesday 21st January at 1pm - 2pm to go through the role in more detail. To attend the virtual recruitment event please use the link below and use the following details to join:

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