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 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.

 

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, 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.

Person specification

Essential Criteria

 

1. Experience of writing programmes and scripts using Python, using agreed specifications to independently design, code, test and document programmes or scripts of medium-high complexity, using the right standards and tools.
2. Experience of engineering systems with a variety of technologies and patterns; designing systems, choosing appropriate technology, and embedding security controls.
3. Ability to collaborate effectively on initiatives to improve overall team performance, working as part of a small and agile team to meet service needs.
4. Experience of taking ownership of the end-to-end process of delivering a feature within agreed project parameters.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £36,585, Scottish Government contributes £9,877 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

Interview dates TBC.

Apply using link provided.

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

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.