Lead Developer - Ministry of Justice - G7

Location

East Midlands (England), East of England, London (region), North East England, North West England, Scotland, South East England, South West England, Wales, West Midlands (England), Yorkshire and the Humber

The Role

Please note this role requires you to pass Security Check clearance. Please click on the link for details.

We’re recruiting for Lead Software Developers here at Justice Digital, Data and Science to be part of our warm and collaborative Legal Aid Agency (LAA) Digital team.

This role aligns against Lead Developer from the Government Digital and Data Framework.

We really want to hear from people who value making a difference and building user-centred services using modern tools and practices as part of a highly collaborative team. We strongly encourage empathetic approaches and cross functional working and are looking for people to help build on this culture of agility and openness.

As an example, you could be helping teams that are:

·      Building services to enhance an application for legal aid

·      Developing services to process and review applications for legal aid caseworkers

·      Providing access to court data

·      Building services to provide access to historic applications

Key Responsibilities:

In addition to hands-on development, you will inspire, mentor, coach, manage and lead Software Developers within a business domain. You will focus on generating a culture of quality, maintaining balance between building sustainable well architected products and unlocking citizen value early.

The areas of your responsibility for leadership will shift between people, architecture, development and product strategy, depending on context and need.

You will have responsibility for one team, or two small related teams, and report to the Principal Developers.

Technical Leadership:

·      Collaborate with Technical Architects and Product Managers to set product direction

·      Collaborate with Technical Architects to help in the design of systems and implementation of coherent and sustainable technical roadmaps

·      Lead discussions with Developers to nurture consensus on technical/team decisions

·      Support backlog refinement, helping plan, define and prioritise actionable tasks for the team

·      Build inclusivity and understanding by promoting strategies to share technical knowledge of our systems with appropriate documentation and other activities

·      Support Delivery Managers in unblocking value where necessary and/or honest representations of effort in an agile environment as the teams learn more

Engineering Management:

·      Managing, coaching and growing people with a focus on their wellbeing and development

·      Support Delivery Managers in improving team maturity

Engineering Profession:

·      Work with your local Principal Developers and the wider community to improve and maintain good coding standards and practices

·      Help provide feedback on wider technical strategy of your business unit

·      Share knowledge and build enthusiasm for sharing via activities like brown bags, cooperative workshops, chat discussions and other means

·      Encourage open discussion and drive communities in our primary communication tools

·      Have a mindset for growth and learning, looking for emerging technologies, tools and good practice

·      Help build and maintain a diverse, inclusive culture across the development community, growing awareness, inclusivity, and balance

·      Take part in the recruitment and onboarding of other Developers

Our Tech Stack

We rely on Java, Python or Ruby to write our application code, GitHub Actions for CI/CD, Sentry for application monitoring, Kubernetes and Docker to schedule and run our services (read about our Cloud Platform), AWS for most of our infrastructure, GOV.UK Design System for our web interfaces and use MacBook Pros.

For front-end development, we value a robust understanding of the underlying web technologies. We value well-maintained, open-source tools that can be used to produce semantic HTML, performant CSS and unobtrusive JavaScript with Express.js and TypeScript, and we assess all our services against accessibility criteria.

We’re happy to help you learn our tech stack once you’re part of our team, and do not require an exact match in your experience of languages. Check out GitHub for a closer look at the technologies we use, and a complete list of services that we build and maintain. We subscribe to the manifesto for agile software development.

If this feels like an exciting challenge, something you are enthusiastic about, and want to join our team please read on and apply!

Person Specification

Essential

●      You have experience making and guiding complex technical decisions and contributing to technical strategy.

●      You have experience nurturing a culture of good software practice that makes change easy.

●      You have contributed towards building a high performing, inclusive team culture.

●      You have experience in delivering value sooner and safer, through DevOps, XP or other ways of working that lead to agility and collaboration.

●      You have experience either coaching or managing other people.

●      You have been involved in building or contributing to a community of practice.

●      Contribution towards the team e.g. being point of contact or team advocate, working with stakeholders, helping with Delivery Manager and Product Manager DM/PM activities, improving processes.

●      Contribution towards other developers: e.g. coaching / training / inspiring; encouraging L&D.

Willingness to be assessed against the requirements for SC clearance