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These are exciting times at the Department for Education. We are transforming to become a user centred organisation, delivering better outcomes for all our users through agile and iterative software development and continuous improvement.

You will work with user researchers, product managers, designers, business analysts, delivery managers and content specialists as part of a multi-disciplinary team to directly deliver better outcomes for users. You will innovate to radically transform how public services are delivered and improved.

Read more about software development on the DfE Digital blog.

 Lead developer

You will

  • Be responsible for a team of developers, including line management

  • Work with the development community to ensure we build maintainable and sustainable digital products

  • Stay up to date with, and support the creation of, standards around development practices and techniques to best enable our teams to consistently deliver at pace

  • Handle allocation of developers to teams, ensuring a good balance of personalities, skills and seniority, enabling the teams to deliver great services quickly

  • Mentor development teams, helping ensure they’re building things to our standards, and identifying opportunities for collaboration and career progression

  • Advocate user-centric, agile approaches which focus on rapid, effective delivery of high quality digital services

  • Transform government into a modern, agile development centre by embedding practices like Test Driven Development, continuous deployment, and DevOps

  • Support sharing of methods and technologies across teams, government, and the industry by helping to organise internal and external events

  • Help publicise our achievements and learning through blog posts and social media

  • Participate in support during office hours, and sometimes out of hours (for which you’ll be paid an allowance)

  • Work with the Head of Software Development to build and maintain a diverse, inclusive culture across the development community, growing awareness, inclusivity, and balance

You’ll have

Essential

  • Expert knowledge of current and new technologies, and knowledge of open source concepts and technologies, including of Ruby on Rails or C# .NET

  • Experience directing and managing technical teams to deliver user-focused services in an agile environment

  • Experience sharing practices such as Test-Driven Development, CI/CD, and DevOps as well as modern development workflows, ideally using GitHub

  • A cloud-first approach and experience of IaaS and PaaS solutions as well as understanding infrastructure-as-code and containerisation

  • Experience of good software design concepts such as OOD, SOLID, RESTful API design and loosely coupled microservices architectures

  • A good understanding of web application security and awareness of the OWASP Top 10 security vulnerabilities

  • Experience of sharing knowledge, mentoring others, and working in a diverse and inclusive multi-disciplinary team

Technical skills

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

  • Modern standard approach - You can use a modern standards approach to solve problems, using test driven development (TDD) techniques

  • Programming and build - You can write clear, concise and maintainable code using standard tools

  • A systematic approach to problem solving