Senior Software Developer - Automation Team

Why are we hiring a senior developer for our automation team?

We have ambitious targets to reduce reliance on manual business processes and transition to digital delivery of many of our services. As a Senior Developer working in a small agile team you'll be key to the Home Office delivering on this vision. We have Business Analysts who will support you in defining the existing, and to be processes. We have Test Engineers to ensure we are catching defects early in our automations and we have User Researchers and Ethics advisors to ensure we are considering people in all that we do.

If you'd want to be responsible for the technical design and implementation of process automations and APIs using the latest tools then this is definitely one for you!

Your Mission

You’ll be a team player and take ownership over the products, features and services your team looks after and above all you’ll want to support our mission to transform the critical systems we look after.

Your team will be responsible for delivering Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions, workflow automations, wrapping legacy systems with APIs and integrating automation solutions via APIs. You’ll form part of the centralised Shared Application Services engineering capability within Home Office and as such will have opportunities to automate across the entire department.

As well as building solutions, we really want our engineers to be responsible for the live running service. We believe in, “you build it, you own it!”. We want you to get rapid feedback and to own the technical solutions to problems. Version control, secure coding, testing and how to improve your automated delivery pipeline will be at the forefront of your mind. We want you to support your colleagues with technical advice and help us grow our more junior automaton engineers.

We strongly believe in continuous professional development.We will give you the training, resources, and time to keep yourself up to date.

What can you expect to be doing on a day to day?

As a Senior Developer you’ll take ownership over the products, features and services your team looks after, being curious at heart with a desire to make things better. You’ll prioritise the focus on being one team with a passion for nurturing, coaching and sharing your knowledge with others whilst ensuring high quality code is delivered in line with project goals and delivery cycles and thrive using agile methods.

You'll also be:

• delivering secure, reliable, scalable automations and APIs, and supporting your team with technical tasks when needed
• evaluating and advising on design choices and ensuring that automations and APIs are high quality and balances technical and business considerations
• defining and documenting test cases for new automations and maintaining live automations to ensure ongoing performance
• support and maintenance of automations and APIs through to a production environment
• evolving new approaches/solutions with other professions through discoveries, maintaining a focus on automation development and deployment
• helping prioritise and direct technical tasks across your team, to balance new and live services
• leading teams and projects, line management, helping colleagues with their career development and coaching more junior staff members

What do you need to be successful?

You'll be a developer who is confident developing applications, passionate about automation and software development and want to be involved throughout the product lifecycle, from idea generation, design, and prototyping to execution, and shipping whilst having experience with:

• designing and authoring RESTful APIs
• a language such as C#, Java or, JavaScript
• use of cloud-based technologies such as AWS or Azure
• a strong focus on continuous delivery and experience of agile ways of working
• supporting live services
• providing technical guidance to your colleagues and junior automation developers

Whilst this is not a deal breaker, given the focus of this team it would be a bonus if you also have a desire to learn about Artificial Intelligence driven automation and the following skills or experience:

• designing and authoring Robotic Process Automations using tools such as UiPath
• workflow automation platform such as Microsoft PowerAutomate

Some of the benefits our developers enjoy!

• one of the higher starting salaries across the Civil Service
• a Civil Service pension with employer contribution rates of between 26.6% and 30.3%, depending upon salary
• 25 days annual leave on appointment, plus 8 days public holidays and 1 day for the Queen’s Birthday, rising further with service
• flexible working options to enable you to achieve the work life balance that right for you including part-time, flexi time and job sharing 
• training and development opportunities tailored to your role
• an in-year bonus scheme
• a culture encouraging inclusion and diversity 

You will also have access to benefits such as:

• season ticket loans and rental deposit loans
• cycle to work and payroll giving
• employee discounts - including a huge number of retailers (via the Edenred platform), Microsoft Home Use programme and gym membership
• a variety of staff recognition schemes including thank you vouchers
• health and wellbeing initiatives including monthly mindfulness sessions
• staff support networks
• maternity, adoption or shared parental leave of up to 26 weeks full pay followed by 13 weeks of statutory pay and a further 13 weeks unpaid
• maternity and adoption support leave (paternity leave) of 2 weeks full pay
• up to 5 days paid leave for volunteering
• study leave and support for studying for a qualification or other accredited development relevant to your role