D2/G7 Lead Software Engineer

at  Insolvency Service

JOB SUMMARY

We have an exciting opportunity for a talented, enthusiastic Lead Software Engineer within The Insolvency Service’s Digital Services Team. We are responsible for developing, maintaining and supporting the agency’s line of business applications.
We’d love you to consider working for us. Working within the Change and Technology Services directorate, the Digital Services Team maintains, enhances and supports a line of business applications that form the backbone of The Insolvency Service’s digital offering. We’re looking for talented and enthusiastic people to come and join our flexible, family-friendly team.
Digital Services prides itself on making your working environment a great place to build a career. We offer continuous investment in your future, with opportunities for training, and developing your skills, whilst at the same time doing something that matters. As well as that you’ll find flexible working and an inclusive culture and a place where your opinion is valued.

JOB DESCRIPTION

Digital Services is a predominantly an in-house team, with a small 3rd party DevSecOps function. We’ve recently moved away from a hybrid development and support partnership, with the aim of bringing the function in-house. We are also consolidating our technology stack and moving away from legacy services, so this is a fantastic opportunity to help shape our digital services and the way we work for a sustainable, user centric future. We would love to for you to be part of that new team.
Digital services is part of Change and Technology Services (CTS) who support and improve applications and systems across the agencies IT landscape. CTS provide key services including digital services, cyber security and information governance, service architecture and governance and digital programme delivery.

TECHNICAL SKILLS

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

• Candidates who are invited to interview will be asked to review a hypothetical technical scenario that will be provided at interview. The candidate will be asked to outline their approach to that scenario and questioned regarding their response.

Benefits
Alongside your salary of £55,000, Insolvency Service contributes £15,933 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

We want you to have a good work-life balance and want to support you in all that you do, so we offer a great benefits package including:

• flexible working arrangements and flexi-time
• full time new entrants to the Civil Service and those Civil Servants on modernised terms and conditions will be entitled to 25 days leave increasing on a sliding scale to 30 days after 5 years’ service
• in addition to this you are entitled to 8 public/bank holidays plus an additional day of privilege leave
• competitive maternity, paternity and parental leave
• 5 days paid leave for learning and development
• 5 days paid for volunteering
• a Cycle to work scheme
• staff have access to an employee assistance programme, Workplace Wellness, for confidential, independent support and advice during difficult times in either their professional or personal life

Your pension is a valuable part of your total reward package where the employer makes a significant contribution to the cost of your pension. Your contributions come out of your salary before any tax is taken. This means, if you pay tax, your take-home pay will not be reduced by the full amount of your contribution; and your pension will continue to provide valuable benefits for you and your family if you are too ill to continue to work or die before you retire. For more information, visit www.civilservicepensionscheme.org.uk
Things you need to know

NATIONALITY REQUIREMENTS

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

RESPONSIBILITIES

As a Lead Software Engineer you will:

• Support the design and lead the implementation of digital services using C#, HTML, CSS, JavaScript (client-side, express.js, hapi) and the Azure stack, i.e. Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, AI Search, Azure app services, Function apps, meeting the requirements of the Technology Code of Practice and Gov.UK Service manual.
• Work with a multi-disciplinary team and business stakeholders, fostering good relationships and responding to views and challenges from others.
• Provide technical support for a small team of engineers across one or two digital services.
• Ensure that we build digital products that are interoperable, share components and are sustainable, i.e. perform well and share infrastructure as much as possible to keep energy use and costs as low as possible.
• Work with the wider agency leadership team, promoting the work of digital services, helping build and maintain a diverse inclusive culture across the agency
• Develop and sustain modern development standards, practices and techniques in our development team
• Support, coach and mentor less experienced developers in the team.
• Advocate user-centric, agile approaches which focus on efficient, effective delivery of high-quality digital services within the team and the wider agency.
• Transform government into a modern, agile development centre by embedding practices such as Behaviour and Test-Driven Development, continuous deployment, and DevOps.

To be successful in this role, you will need:

• Proven ability to lead the delivery of complex software solutions across all project phases in a multi-disciplinary agile team, utilising C#, JavaScript and the Azure stack.
• Experience of IaaS and PaaS solutions and ability to analyse legacy services to upgrade to PaaS.
• To understand the importance of good documentation, contribute to the design of- and support the architectural decision making for our digital services.
• Enthusiasm for sharing knowledge and mentoring others, supporting the team and nurturing its growth.
• Knowledge and experience of modern development practices such as BDD and TDD, CI/CD, and DevOps, modern development workflows, ideally using GitHub, as well as an understanding of modern design principles such as clean architecture, OOP, SOLID, RESTful APIs.
• A good understanding of web application security and awareness of the OWASP Top 10 security vulnerabilities

We want you to have a good work-life balance and want to support you in all that you do, so we offer a great benefits package including:

• flexible working arrangements and flexi-time
• full time new entrants to the Civil Service and those Civil Servants on modernised terms and conditions will be entitled to 25 days leave increasing on a sliding scale to 30 days after 5 years’ service
• in addition to this you are entitled to 8 public/bank holidays plus an additional day of privilege leave
• competitive maternity, paternity and parental leave
• 5 days paid leave for learning and development
• 5 days paid for volunteering
• a Cycle to work scheme
• staff have access to an employee assistance programme, Workplace Wellness, for confidential, independent support and advice during difficult times in either their professional or personal lif