Software Engineer - Scottish Government - SEO

Would you like to help build and run the platforms underpinning public services in Scotland?

Access to public services is key. The Digital Identity team is hiring Software Engineers to realise our vision of providing users with a safe, easy way to prove who they are and access the services to which they are entitled.

Joining our team, you can enjoy working on deep technical problems at scale, delivering for a diverse mix of users knowing you make a positive, tangible difference to potentially millions of people’s lives.

You’ll also be enabling wider digital transformation across the public sector. As part of the Digital Components and Infrastructure division, our mission is to design, build, and operate Scottish Government platforms for Public Sector bodies across Scotland including Digital Identity, Payments, Cloud Computing, and other common capabilities. There are also opportunities to work in platform engineering, generalising, and building out an emerging Internal Developer Platform.

The Role

As a Software Engineer, you will: develop software to meet user needs, writing clean, efficient, secure, documented and well tested code; operate the services you build and identify issues in production: observe best practises contribute to their improvement; and have awareness of common security vulnerabilities and how to mitigate them. 

We welcome developers interested in working across both the front and back end (recognising you may be stronger in one of the areas). 

Our services and applications run on AWS (Amazon Web Services) using Kubernetes, backend services are written in Java, with Node JS and Typescript used for front end applications. Persistence is provided by S3, DynamoDB and Redis. We use Grafana/Prometheus for metrics and dashboarding; and Gitlab for CI/CD. The cloud platform team operate both an AWS and Azure platform. 

We don’t require experience of our specific tech stack and will support you to learn it or refresh your skills.  There will also be opportunities to work with additional technologies beyond those listed above.

Job description

Responsibilities

Availability and capacity management

• Managing service components to ensure they meet business needs and performance targets.

Software engineering (Programming and build) 

• Collaborating with others when necessary to review specifications.
• Using agreed specifications to design, code, test and document programs or scripts of medium-to-high complexity, using the right standards and tools.

User focus

• Collaborating with user researchers and representing users internally, you champion user research to focus on all users.
• Prioritising and defining approaches to understand the user story, guiding others in doing so.
• Offering recommendations on the best tools and methods to use.

Development process optimisation

• Supporting specific activities to improve and identifying obvious deficiencies in development processes.

Information security

• Participating in the information security process.
• Designing and implementing embedded security controls in solutions and services.

Prototyping 

• Participating in team prototyping, advocating for the use of prototyping, and testing with others.
• Establishing and iterating design patterns.
• Using a variety of prototyping methods and choosing the most appropriate.

Systems design 

• Designing systems characterised by managed levels of risk, manageable business and technical complexity, and meaningful impact.
• Producing detailed designs and working well with understood technology and identify appropriate patterns.

Person specification

Success Profile

Success profiles are specific to each job and they include the mix of skills, experience and behaviours candidates will be assessed on.

Technical / Professional Skills:

We will assess you against the following technical skills during the selection process: 

• Programming and build (software engineering) - (Level: Practitioner) 
• Modern standards approach - (Level: Practitioner) 
• Information security - (Level: Practitioner)

This role is aligned to Software Developer within the Software Engineering/Development job family. You can find out more about the skills required, here.

Experience:

You run it - Your experience developing and deploying an application allows you to help identify and fix faults following agreed procedures and carry out agreed maintenance tasks.

You design it - Your experience of the technologies and patterns used by your team enables you to produce detailed designs of components and data structures using well understood technology, appropriate patterns, and security controls embedded. 

Behaviours:

Making Effective Decisions (Level 3)

Communicating and Influencing (Level 3)

DDaT Pay Supplement

This post attracts a £5000 Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) pay supplement after a 3 months DDaT competency qualifying period. The payment will be backdated to your start date in the role. 

Pay supplements are temporary payments designed to address recruitment and retention issues caused by market pressures and are subject to regular review. This post is part of the Scottish Government DDaT profession. As a member of the profession you will join the professional development system, currently BCS Role Mode plus.