Senior Software Engineer - ONS - SEO

Location

The ONS operates a flexible hybrid working model across the UK, with colleagues linked to one of our contractual locations working between office and remote throughout the week. The locations for this role are Newport, Titchfield (Fareham), Manchester, London.

All colleagues are required to work from their contractually allocated site for at least 40% of their working time.

The induction process for the role will be conducted in person.

About the job

Job summary

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK’s largest producer of official statistics, covering a range of key economic, social and demographic topics.  These include measuring changes in the value of the UK economy, estimating the size, geographic distribution and characteristics of the population, and providing indicators of price inflation, employment, earnings, crime and migration.

We are looking for experienced front end Software Engineers with excellent web programming skills in JavaScript, CSS, HTML to join our team. You will work alongside multi-disciplinary teams and play a pivotal role in projects that are in critical need of web development expertise. Experience of version control in a distributed team like Git would be valued. Knowledge of the development and execution of scientific applications on parallel computers and knowledge of interactive frameworks would be advantageous.

Working within the Health and International Directorate you will thrive using agile methods and enjoy working openly and collaboratively with multi-disciplinary teams.   This is a dynamic role where the Senior Software Engineer will be pivotal in maintaining our existing service standards whilst also guiding the teams through technology transition.

Job description

A Software Engineer designs, runs, tests and improve software that meets the user’s needs. You are responsible for writing clean, secure code following a test-driven approach. You will create a code that is open by default and easy for others to use.

A senior developer delivers and integrates complicated or higher risk software to form a complete service.

Responsibilities

The role will include:

• Plan and lead development of software solutions for sets of related stories
• Have an understanding of the whole system and take responsibility for teaching this to others.
• Work with other disciplines to understand what needs to be built.
• Coach and mentor others
• Configure, build, and implement a continuous delivery environment, using effective delivery and deployment techniques.
• Operate the production services they build.
• Find ways to improve system robustness, resilience, and stability.
• Design and execute a range of test techniques.

Person specification

Essential Criteria:

• Programming and build (software engineering) (Practitioner) - Collaborates with others when necessary to review specifications and uses these agreed specifications to design, code, test and document programs or scripts of medium to high complexity, using the right standards and tools.
  Contributes to code reviews and gives constructive feedback to others.
• Functional and non-functional testing (Practitioner) - Able to design, implement and execute a wide range of functional and non-functional testing techniques. Able to effectively communicate test results to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Able to make decisions on running types of, and environments for testing. Able to raise defects with the business and help prioritise them based on defect severity. Able to think creatively, ask the right questions and critically evaluate findings. Leads investigative work into problems and opportunities with existing processes, driving the collection of information and creation of recommendations for improvements. Can absorb large amounts of conflicting information and use it to determine solutions
• Service support (Practitioner) - Identifies, locates, and competently fixes faults. Able to investigate undocumented issues and develop fixes. Can triage issues and build stories for more involved issues, document processes and support more junior colleagues.
• Communicating between technical and non-technical (Practitioner) - Able to listen to the needs of technical and business stakeholders and interpret them. Able to manage stakeholders’ expectations and be flexible, is capable of proactive and reactive communication. Facilitates difficult discussions within the team or with diverse senior stakeholders.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Changing and Improving
• Delivering at Pace
• Making Effective Decisions
• Working Together

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Programming and Build
• Functional and Non Functional Testing
• Service Support
• Communication between Technical and Non Technical