Software Engineer

at  Scottish Government

JOB SUMMARY

The Scottish Public Pensions Agency is an Agency of the Scottish Government. Our principal role is to administer the pensions for employees in the National Health Service, Teachers’, Police and Fire-fighters’ pension schemes in Scotland. The Agency administers these public service pension schemes on behalf of Scottish Ministers with an annual pension spend to over 200,000 pensioners of more than £2.5 billion.
We are seeking a talented Senior Python Software Engineer to join our team and take the lead in developing and maintaining new software for our pensions administration service. This role is an exciting opportunity to be at the forefront of improved services for Scottish public sector workers. The post involves designing, implementing, and optimizing Python-based applications for pension management, award calculations, contributions, benefits, and projections. You will have a background in software engineering, experience in Python programming, and an understanding of complex numerical calculations.
As a Software Engineer, you will have established software development expertise and a strong focus on delivering consistently to a high quality. This will involve being instrumental in the successful design and implementation of applications, APIs and other components. You will work as part of a small team to ensure successful delivery of high profile programmes of work.
A developer delivers software components that form part of a product. At this role level, you will: develop software to meet user needs, follow best practice guidelines and help to improve those guidelines, write clean, secure and well-tested code, coach and mentor more junior colleagues, and operate the services you build and identify issues in production.

JOB DESCRIPTION

• Manage service components to ensure they meet business needs and performance targets, support specific activities to improve development processes and identify obvious deficiencies in development processes. Help fix faults following agreed procedures, and carry out agreed maintenance tasks on infrastructure.
• Participate in the information security process; design and implement embedded security controls in solutions and services, competently applying a modern standards approach and guiding others to do so.
• Collaborate with others when necessary to review specifications, and use the agreed specifications to design, code, test and document programs or scripts of medium-to-high complexity, using the right standards and tools.
• Participate in team prototyping, and advocate for the use of prototypes and testing with others; establish design patterns and iterate them, using a variety of prototyping methods and choose the most appropriate.
• Translate logical designs into physical designs; produce detailed designs and effectively document all work using required standards, methods and tools, including prototyping tools where appropriate.
• Design systems characterised by managed levels of risk, manageable business and technical complexity, and meaningful impact; build and test simple interfaces between systems, working on more complex integration as part of a wider team.
• Collaborate with user researchers, representing users internally and champion user research to focus on all users. Prioritise and define approaches to understand the user story, guiding others in doing so.
• Apply your expertise in Python and Java programming to ensure successful delivery of high profile projects, working as part of a multi-disciplinary digital team to support and inform the full development lifecycle of new features and products, applying your expertise to benefit both colleagues and end users.

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)

Please refer the Job description for details