Senior Software Developer

Job content

About The Role

This role sits within the ESFA Service Delivery team and will focus on:

• developing one of our digital services to calculate funding allocations creating funding contracts or publish information digitally to meet user needs developing business requirements and using an array of digital tools to improve project delivery ensuring that code conforms to industry best practices, Government Digital Service (GDS) standards, internal development guidelines and aligns with the strategic vision of the Department for Education.
  

You Will

Lead a team of outstanding software developers to help build and run great digital services, ensure high quality output through collaboration with other teams and disciplines and assist in defining and enhancing the approaches taken to the creation and delivery of software solutions.

As a Senior Software Developer you will lead on both front- and back-end web development, including the creation of internal and public facing APIs. You will work with technical architects, test leads, and DevOps colleagues to create the best solutions and to ensure the smooth transition from development through to production and take responsibility for the support of the applications you build, including occasional support outside of office hours.

Responsibilities

As a Team Lead you will be responsible for supporting and managing your team, combining your managerial expertise with your software engineering capability, ensuring delivery, and motivating the team to achieve.

Your Key Areas Of Impact Will Be

You will take ownership over the products, features and services your team looks after, being curious at heart with a desire to make things better

• Delivering secure, reliable, and scalable software and supporting your team with technical tasks when needed
• Evaluating and advising on design choices and ensuring that software is high quality and balances technical and business considerations
  

Working with the Product Manager to make sure business needs are met with high-functioning software solutions

• Defining and documenting test cases for new systems and maintaining live systems to ensure ongoing performance
• Evolving new approaches/solutions with other professions through discoveries, maintain a focus on development and deployment
• You will help prioritise and direct technical tasks across your team, to balance new and live services
• Ensure any reusable code created and any innovative work done within the team is communicated
• Share knowledge of tools and techniques with the wider team of developers and non-developers
  
Hold the technical responsibility for all stages of a software development project, ensuring compliance, and set the standards for programming tools and techniques

About You – We are looking for someone with the following proven skills:

Essential

The ability to build scalable, server-side, cloud-based web applications (preferably Microsoft Azure)

A detailed knowledge of C#, .NET, ASP.NET & MVC programming languages

A detailed understanding of front-end web development, from one or some of the following (HTML/CSS/Java Script), and Visual Studio

An ability to develop software using SQL server as the underlying data store or Cosmos db.

Sound analytical skills and good judgement when making decisions or providing opinions or advice to others. Experienced in providing hands on technical leadership

Experience of agile development (Scrum/Kanban), software patterns, SOLID principles, continuous integration and deployment and Test-Driven Development, behaviour driven development (BDD) tools and techniques and Git version control

Understanding of the use of Responsive Web Design. Able to deliver web services using Web API and Open Standards with a good understanding of web security

Full software delivery lifecycle through to orderly software retirement

A good understanding of architectural patterns and principles

Able to champion user research to focus on all users. Can prioritise and defines approaches to understand the user story, guiding others in doing so

Curiosity - the urge to find out why things are the way they are and to seek out new challenges

Problem solving - the imagination, tenacity, and intelligence to find the best solution

To have the ability to persuade and influence senior grades and stakeholders and advise and have the expertise to be able to guide more junior colleagues on complex issues within their area of the business