About the job

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 strong background in software engineering, expertise in Python programming, and a deep understanding of complex numerical calculations. You will also line manage a small software development team.

 

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

 

This post attracts a £5000 Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) pay supplement after a 3 months DDaT competency qualifying period. Pay supplements are temporary payments designed to address recruitment and retention issues caused by market pressures and are subject to regular review. This post is part of the Scottish Government DDaT profession. As a member of the profession, you will join the professional development system, currently BCS RoleModelplus.

Job description

• Manage service components to ensure they meet business needs and performance targets, identifying process optimisation opportunities with guidance and contribute to the implementation of proposed solutions.

• Participate in the information security process; design and implement embedded security controls in solutions and services.

• Competently apply a modern standards approach and guide others to do so, collaborating with others to review specifications. Use 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, advocating 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.

• Identify, locate and fix faults.

• Design systems characterised by medium levels of risk, impact, and business or technical complexity, selecting appropriate design standards, methods and tools, and ensuring they are applied effectively. Review the systems designs of others to ensure the selection of appropriate technology, efficient use of resources and integration of multiple systems and technology.

• Define the integration build, co-ordinating build activities across systems, with an effective understanding of how to undertake and support integration testing activities.

• Collaborate with user researchers and represent users internally, acting as a champion of user research to focus on all users. Prioritise and define approaches to understand the user story, guiding others in doing so, and offer recommendations on the best tools and methods to use.

• 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.

Person specification

Essential Criteria

 

1. Significant experience of building solutions to problems of high complexity using Python programming language, algorithm design, optimization, and implementation for numerical computations, using agreed specifications to independently design, code, test and document programs or scripts of high complexity.

2. Significant experience of engineering systems with a variety of technologies and patterns; designing systems, choosing appropriate technology, and embedding security controls.

3. Ability to lead initiatives to improve overall engineering team performance, working as part of a small and agile team to meet service needs.

4. Experience of applying software development best practices, including agile and testing methodologies, and developing strong relationships with product, design, security, and stakeholders.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £45,449, Scottish Government contributes £12,271 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

Interviews dates TBC.

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

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check. 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

Please note this Post is NOT regulated by the Civil Service Commission. 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.