About the job

Job summary

At Scottish Government, we don't just employ people; we’re building a family. Your influence will not go unnoticed and will help to shape our organisation's future!

Would you like to build and run the platforms that underpin public services in Scotland? In the cloud and platform services division, our mission is to design, build, and operate a Scottish Government platform for Public Sector bodies across Scotland, providing: Cloud Computing, Digital Payments, and Digital Identity. By establishing common platforms, we support organisational transformation, allowing bodies to deliver their services more efficiently, more quickly, and at scale.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will have broad software development expertise and will understand the goals and strategy behind each project from inception to running as a live service. This will involve providing technical expertise at the project level and responsibility for successful delivery of individual applications or components.

Job description

Your responsibilities will include:

A Senior Developer delivers and integrates software to form a complete service. Senior developers plan and lead development on sets of related stories; have an understanding of the whole system and take responsibility for teaching this to others. They work with other disciplines to understand what needs to be built, coach and mentor more junior colleagues, operate the production services they build and find ways to improve system robustness, resilience and stability

Additional Duties

Strategic

• Set the architectural vision for a component
• Regularly reflect on the capabilities and maturity in your engineering team and contribute to the process of continuous improvement
• Promote the highest professional standards to lead and educate more junior team members

Operational

Working with others:

• Collaborate with delivery teams and partners to break technical requirements down into appropriate pieces
• Collaborate with external suppliers to ensure that their system architectures meet our requirements, including: application design and integration points
• Work with the design & UX team to deliver usable, accessible solutions that meet users’ needs and exceed user expectations

Team process:

• Lead and participate in the planning and prioritising of software delivery
• Continuously improve development and integration processes
• Choose and apply a variety of software methods from agile and lean to day-to-day development

Technical leadership in the team:

• Lead the design and implementation of robust, scalable, open and secure systems ensuring delivery to the highest standard
• Lead and mentor more junior developers
• Provide advice and consultancy to other engineers in areas of special technical expertise (e.g. security, data engineering, build and deployment etc)
• Select appropriate technologies such as whether to use low code solutions, which cloud technologies, and database choice

Technical delivery:

• Understand and capture business problems and produce technical solutions to them
• Write software, across the entire software development life cycle, using a variety of software design patterns
• Directly deliver and operate, and guide others in the delivery and operation of, software solutions in a complex environment
• Use automation, continuous delivery and continuous deployment practices to deploy high quality applications on a consistent schedule
• Write infrastructure as code for the deployment of software on the cloud

Running production services:

• Design and implement monitoring and alerting to provide sufficient indication of performance and any issues in production systems
• Operate production systems, detecting any issues, identifying the cause, finding resolutions and implementing fixes

Secure development:

• Work with security architects on the design and implementation of threat mitigations
• Develop systems with security and privacy built in from the start

Person specification

No formal qualifications are required for this role. We would love you to apply if you meet the following essential criteria.

•  Designing, implementing and managing complex service components to ensure they meet business needs and performance targets including security, resilience and scalability
• Contributing to the continual improvement of team delivery and capability through activities including mentoring, sharing of technical expertise on areas of expertise and application of agile software development practices
• Hands on experience or in-depth understanding of continuous delivery and deployment. Experience with continuous integration tools (e.g. Gitlab), version control (e.g.Git)
• Experience in developing modern high traffic web applications (with two or more of C#, Java, Python, typescript or JavaScript) and deploying these using infrastructure as code in a cloud environment (e.g. Azure)

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £54,973, Scottish Government contributes £14,842 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

Things you need to know

Selection process details

Sift and Interview dates TBC                                
Please apply using the link provided

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

Security

People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

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)

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window). The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.