Lead Developer, GOV.UK Forms

Job description

As a Lead Developer at GDS working on GOV.UK Forms, you'll use your engineering skills and experience to support delivery and operation of the Forms service. You'll provide leadership across multiple teams. Expect a mixture of people management, engineering design, and technical strategy. From time to time it might be beneficial to pair/mob program but that will be ad-hoc rather than regular.

As a Lead Developer you’ll:

• strengthen engineering culture in the GOV.UK Forms teams, supporting continuous improvement, advocating for good practices, good design and code quality, removing toil and drag factors
• work with other discipline leads and senior management to proactively plan technical delivery work, making sure to balance long term engineering sustainability with short term delivery pressures, advocating for technical quality and bringing practical considerations to high level designs
• be a visible leader and role model in your area, championing diversity and inclusion in how we work
• act as a digital ambassador across government, sharing our experiences through public speaking and blog posts
• help GDS test and apply emerging technologies and practices, contributing to the GDS Way
• plan and manage engineering staffing within your area, recruiting civil servants and interim/contractor technologists
• work with cyber security and other security colleagues to deliver secure and operational services
• be part of our programme-wide 2nd line and/or out of hours rotas where all technologists on the programme support our operational services and gain empathy for users and awareness of operational concerns
• directly line-manage 2-4 technologists, supporting their career progression, development and wellbeing, and providing regular coaching and performance feedback

Person specification

We’re interested in people who:

• have strong software development skills in a GDS recommended programming language (Java/Python/Ruby/Node.js and TypeScript), and current knowledge of modern software development practices. GOV.UK Forms uses Ruby on Rails 
• have experience of leading and continuously improving practices such as test-driven development (TDD), continuous integration, continuous delivery and DevOps
• have experience of being a technical leader across multiple teams or have had an impact beyond a single team
• have experience of leading software development work and communicating progress and value in multi-disciplinary agile environments
• have experience in development and operation of modern large scale cloud-based web services using AWS
• can effectively communicate and influence at a programme leadership level and cross-GDS technical leadership level
• are experienced in line management, helping colleagues with their career development and coaching more junior staff members
• have a good understanding of security in operational services from end-to-end