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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.

 Principal developer

You will

  • Be responsible for a large team of developers, setting up line management frameworks where appropriate

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

  • Stay up to date with, and lead 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

  • 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 events

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

  • Build and maintain a diverse, inclusive culture across the development community, growing awareness, inclusivity, and balance

  • 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 at the department to build and maintain a diverse, inclusive culture across the development community, growing awareness, inclusivity, and balance

  • Coordinate developer hiring, shaping our in-house team, making it more diverse and inclusive

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 introducing practices such as Test Driven Development, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and DevOps to teams

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

  • 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 principles such as OOD, SOLID and design patterns

  • Experience of 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