Mid-level and Senior Developer - GDS - G7

Location

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) and the world-leading GOV.UK, and we’re 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 Technology and Security directorate within GDS Product Group provides central technology and security expertise to support the operation of GDS's digital services, including the GOV.UK website, GOV.UK One Login, and our digital service platforms.

Reporting to GDS Product Group CTO, the technology programme is boosting efficiency, strengthening security, and improving developer experience by providing infrastructure, tools and standards. Building upon our current initiatives within GDS's AWS cloud environment, we are establishing four new multi-disciplinary teams to broaden our scope of work:

• Cloud Platform team - owns and operates a thin central platform for our AWS estate
• Developer Experience and Finops team - manages core engineering tooling, proactively works to enhance developer practice & experience and ensures value from our SaaS services
• Engineering Access Operations team - owns and operates identity and access management for our systems and acts as an intelligent customer for IT services, improving overall effectiveness
• Business Enablement team - manages core business tooling and services, supporting business impact and agility

Job description

We are seeking developers and senior developers to join the following teams:

1. Cloud Platform Team (1 Senior, 1 Mid) - working alongside Site Reliability Engineers you'll develop and manage our core AWS cloud platform
2. Developer Experience and Finops team (1 Senior) - you'll build and maintain automations to effectively manage our core engineering tooling, and act as a custodian and advocate for great engineering practice across GDS
3. Engineering Access Operations team - (1 Senior, 1 Mid) - you'll build and maintain automation supporting our core identity and access management system based on Microsoft Entra ID.

All of the roles will involve being working across a range of technologies and being willing to understand the whole system you work on. We use terraform to manage our infrastructure as code. We primarily use Python and GitHub Actions for automation, but also have some Ruby and Golang code. Check out our careers videos on YouTube for more about being a developer at GDS, and join our candidate open call on 12 August, 12:30 to 13:30 on Google Meet to hear from the hiring team and have a chance to ask us questions. 

As a Developer in the Technology programme, 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 automations and services in Python or Ruby to support our internal engineering operations, 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: 

• experience in back-end development, with knowledge of either Python, Ruby or Node.js
• an awareness of technologies used for cloud based web applications, such as databases, containerisation, infrastructure as code
• understanding of software design principles, and an ability to apply them
• familiarity with modern software development approaches such as automated testing, test driven development (TDD), continuous integration, pair programming, code review, observability and version control
• understanding of common web security risks such as OWASP Top 10, and the corresponding mitigations
• enjoy researching and learning new programming tools and techniques and sharing their skills with others
• have experience working in a collaborative environment, and an understanding of the benefits of agile and multi-disciplinary approaches
• a desire to use their skills and experience to make a genuine difference, and to work on important services that are used by millions of people

In addition to the above Senior Developers will also:

• provide technical leadership within a team, advising and working with developers to identify the best approaches and solutions
• take responsibility for solving complex issues, drawing upon a broad knowledge of web technologies
• have supported others in their use of modern software development approaches including automated testing, test driven development, continuous integration, pair programming, code review and version control
• have experience in management, helping colleagues with their career development and coaching more junior staff members
• share knowledge among the GDS teams, ensuring that your team is understood by others and understanding the working of the wider organisation

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.