JOB SUMMARY

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is the digital centre of government — we are responsible for setting, leading and delivering the vision for a modern digital government.

Our priorities are to drive a modern digital government, by:

• joining up public sector services
• harnessing the power of AI for the public good
• strengthening and extending our digital and data public infrastructure
• elevating leadership and investing in talent
• funding for outcomes and procuring for growth and innovation
• committing to transparency and driving accountability

We are home to the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (I.AI), the world-leading GOV.UK and at the forefront of coordinating the UK’s geospatial strategy and activity. We lead the Government Digital and Data function and champion the work of digital teams across government.
We’re part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and employ more than 1,000 people all over the UK, with hubs in Manchester, London and Bristol.
The Government Digital Service is where talent translates into impact. From your first day, you’ll be working with some of the world’s most highly-skilled digital professionals, all contributing their knowledge to make change on a national scale.
Join us for rewarding work that makes a difference across the UK. You’ll solve some of the nation’s highest-priority digital challenges, helping millions of people access services they need
GOV.UK Notify makes it easy for public sector service teams to send emails, text messages and letters. Since its launch in 2016, use of GOV.UK Notify has grown exponentially. Today, more than 1,600 organisations and 10,976 services use it. We’ve sent over 10.8 billion notifications and continue to send millions more notifications every day.
GOV.UK Notify codes in the open, and you can take a look at our code on Github and read our blogs.

JOB DESCRIPTION

GOV.UK Notify is a web application built with Python and Flask, running on Gunicorn. It is supported by several microservices, also written in Python, utilising frameworks and libraries such as Celery, Eventlet, SQLAlchemy, etc.
Additionally, GOV.UK Notify utilises AWS RDS (Postgres), AWS SQS, AWS ElastiCache, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana and other related services. Concourse CI and Terraform are used to run build-pipelines and manage our infrastructure.
For the frontend, we follow the GOV.UK Design System, making use of GOV.UK Frontend components and patterns.

As a Senior Developer in GOV.UK Notify you’ll:

• work as part of a multi-disciplinary agile team, collaborating with frontend developers, content designers, product managers and user researchers to ensure your code puts users first at all stages of development
• write clean and secure code following a test-driven approach
• implement tools to support development and continuous improvement of the systems you work on
• support the live operation of the services we run during office hours, answering support queries from users, monitoring error rates and responding to incidents
• participate in out-of-hours support rotas where necessary - you’ll be paid an allowance, and a further hourly payment for any duties you perform when on call
• share your work and the things you’ve learned through blog posts, show and tells, with the option of presenting at conferences and meetups
• use your learning and development budget to develop your career

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)
• 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

WHILST THIS ROLE’S LOCATION IS BRISTOL/ MANCHESTER, IF YOU ARE A CURRENT CIVIL SERVANT WORKING IN DSIT AND BASED IN LONDON, YOU ARE ALSO ABLE TO APPLY FOR THIS ROLE. IF YOU ARE SUCCESSFUL, YOU WILL RETAIN YOUR LONDON LOCATION AND PAY.

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

The standard selection process for roles at GDS consists of:

• a simple application screening process - you’ll be asked to submit a CV demonstrating your previous work history, that should meet the skills and experience listed in the person specification above. You will also need to answer three application questions based on the person specification. Failure to submit your CV and complete the application questions may result in your application being unsuccessful
• A 20 minute telephone interview (may not be required depending on the volume of applicants)
• a 45 minute pair programming technical exercise - you’ll work with a GDS engineer to solve a self-contained programming problem given to you in writing. You’ll be asked to discuss the problem with the GDS engineer, devise a plan for solving it, and then to write code to solve the problem. As well as your programming and unit testing skills we’ll be evaluating how you communicate and collaborate, and how you break down the problem. You’ll use your own development environment for this (conducted over video conferencing)
• a 75 minute face-to-face interview (conducted over video conferencing

For this role we’ll be assessing you against the following Civil Service Behaviours:

• working together
• changing and improving
• making effective decisions
• leadershi

We’ll also be assessing your experience and specialist technical skills against the following skills defined in the Government Digital and Data Capability Framework for the Senior Developer role:

• Availability and capacity management
• Development process optimisation
• Information security
• Modern standards approach
• Programming and build (software engineering)
• Prototyping
• Service support
• Systems design
• Systems integration
• User focu