Mid and Senior Frontend Developer - GDS - G7

Location

Bristol, London, Manchester

About the job

Job summary

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:

1. joining up public sector services
2. harnessing the power of AI for the public good
3. strengthening and extending our digital and data public infrastructure
4. elevating leadership and investing in talent
5. funding for outcomes and procuring for growth and innovation
6. 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.

Job description

We're recruiting for multiple roles within the GOV.UK directorate - three frontend Developers and two senior frontend Developers. We're conducting a single campaign and will assign a role based on interview performance and merit.

The GOV.UK directorate is the information engine behind the product suite. It manages the central source of trusted content, publishing infrastructure, overarching policy and consistent design that form the crucial foundation for a proactive, personalised user experience that spans multiple digital channels.

The roles are across these teams:

• Web, who build and maintain the central www.gov.uk domain with a focus on content
• Publishing, who look after content management tools for users across government to create and update content across all of GOV.UK's channels
• Insights and Analytics, who are responsible for the performance measurement of GOV.UK and generation of insights and analytics
• GOV.UK Design System, who provide the styles, components and patterns used by teams across government to build services consistent with the GOV.UK

Watch this video to find out more about what it's like to be a frontend developer at GDS.

As a frontend developer you’ll:

• build accessible components and patterns to serve a variety of citizen and government needs, taking responsibility for the quality of code you produce and ensuring that it follows our standards
• have and apply a broad knowledge of core web technologies, and help to define the strategy for frontend development with GDS and wider government
• consider the impact of your changes, versioning releases and collaborating on release notes and documentation to help users to navigate breaking changes
• design and implement automated testing plans to help us deliver with confidence
• share knowledge of tools and techniques with your team (both developers and non-developers) and with the wider frontend community
• participate in our in-house support rotas
• have the opportunity to share your experiences and the things that you’ve learnt with a wider audience, for example by writing blog posts, or speaking at government events

If appointed at senior level you will also:

• help to prioritise and direct technical work across the team
• potentially take on line management of one or more frontend developers
• act as a digital ambassador across government, supporting recruitment, identifying good practices for GDS to adopt and sharing experiences, e.g. through blog posts, tech talks at conferences etc

Person specification

We’re interested in people who have:

• experience in frontend development, with detailed knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript
• experience in building robust and accessible interfaces that work for as many users as possible, regardless of their needs
• experience designing and implementing an asset build pipeline and other supporting tooling required as part of the frontend development environment
• an understanding of software design principles, including progressive enhancement
• the ability to research and learn new development tools and techniques in a supportive environment
• experience researching problems, identifying and evaluating different solutions, and making decisions whilst taking into account the views of peers and stakeholders
• experience of using testing to validate solutions
• understanding of agile environments and version control
• a basic understanding of web security principles
• an awareness of technologies used for web applications, e.g HTTPS, JSON and CDNs, and of Unix-like operating systems, eg Linux and/or Mac OS. 

For our web, publishing and data roles we use Ruby on Rails and will expect you to be familiar with, or upskill in this area as well as bringing your frontend specific skillset to the role. For our Design System role we will expect you to work with Node.