Senior Developer - Ministry of Justice - G7
Government Digital & Data -
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 Senior Developers here at Justice Digital, Data and Science to be part of our warm and collaborative HMPPS team.
This role aligns against Senior Developer from the Government Digital and Data Framework
You’ll be confident working with other developers on our tech stack and comfortable learning new technologies and systems. We use a variety of different technologies and will work with you to place you in a team that matches your skills, interests and aspirations wherever possible.
As a Senior Developer, you could be working on projects such as:
- Improving how prison visits are scheduled and managed.
- Building digital services that help Probation staff support rehabilitation and prepare cases for court.
- Designing services that manage identity data safely and accurately across prisons and probation.
- Modernising legacy systems used by frontline staff, making them easier to use, maintain and improve.
- Building APIs and shared services that allow information to move safely between different parts of the justice system.
- Automating manual processes so staff can spend less time on administration and more time supporting people in prison and on probation.
You will work in multidisciplinary teams with user researchers, product managers, designers, delivery managers, technical architects and content specialists who share a vision for improving government through smarter use of technology.
Our Tech Stack
We use a range of modern technologies, and we’re looking for developers with strong experience in one or more of them, as well as an enthusiasm for learning new languages, tools and frameworks.
Our services are commonly built using Kotlin and Node.js. We use GitHub Actions for CI/CD, tools including Application Insights, Grafana and Sentry for application monitoring and observability, and Docker and Kubernetes to package and run our services. Much of our infrastructure runs on AWS, supported by the Ministry of Justice Cloud Platform.
For web interfaces, we use the GOV.UK Design System and MOJ Design System and place a strong emphasis on accessible, user-centred services.
For front-end development, we value a strong understanding of the underlying web technologies. We favour well-maintained, open-source tools and aim to produce semantic HTML, performant CSS, and maintainable, unobtrusive JavaScript or TypeScript. Accessibility is a core part of how we design, build and assess our services.
You don’t need to have used exactly the same technologies as us. We’re happy to help you learn our stack, and we’re more interested in strong engineering fundamentals and your ability to pick up new technologies. For more detail on our tech stack, look at the MoJ Technical Radar.
You can explore the Ministry of Justice GitHub organisation to see examples of the services we build and maintain.
We work in agile, multidisciplinary teams and follow the principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.
Our developers are provided with MacBook Pros for their day-to-day work.
Our Community
You’ll be joining a large and supportive engineering community across the Ministry of Justice, with developers working on services used throughout prisons, probation and the wider justice system.
As a Senior Developer, you’ll help coach and mentor other developers, share your knowledge, and contribute to communities of practice across MoJ. We encourage developers to get involved beyond their immediate team through technical discussions, talks, meet-ups, open-source projects and shared engineering initiatives.
We take supportive and effective line management seriously. We’ll value the experience and skills you bring, while helping you develop further through coaching, learning opportunities and exposure to different teams and technologies.
As your career develops, there are opportunities to move between teams, take on different technical challenges and progress into roles with greater technical or leadership responsibility.
To get a feel for how we work, take a look at the Ministry of Justice Developer Portal or the Justice Digital blog.
Key Responsibilities:
As a Senior Software Developer at the MoJ, you’ll combine hands-on technical work with supporting and developing the people around you.
Technical responsibilities
- Designing, building and maintaining secure APIs, services and systems
- Working collaboratively on existing codebases, helping to understand and improve them over time
- Improving the resilience, reliability and maintainability of our software
- Using practices that support safe, frequent and sustainable delivery
Supporting people and teams
- Supporting the development of others through line management, coaching and mentoring
- Working closely with Lead Developers and colleagues to create supportive, effective teams
- Sharing knowledge and creating opportunities for others to learn and grow
- Helping to build and sustain a diverse, inclusive and welcoming development community, where different perspectives are valued
If this sounds like work you’d enjoy and you’re interested in joining a supportive development community, we’d love to hear from you.
Person Specification
Essential Criteria
You will:
- Solve problems in a systematic and innovative way
- Champion software maintenance, clean code, coding standards and modern development and deployment techniques
- Enjoy sharing knowledge, mentoring, coaching and working in a multi-disciplinary team
- Thrive when you work as part of a team that abides by the spirit of the manifesto of agile software development
- Communicate technical information to a range of audiences
- Hold yourself and others to a high standard
- Demonstrate experience of delivering large and complex software solutions
- Demonstrate experience working in Java, Kotlin, TypeScript or JavaScript
Willingness to be assessed against the requirements for SC clearance.
