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Principal developer

Grade
G6
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You will

  • Be responsible for a large team of developers, setting up line management frameworks where appropriate

  • Work with the development community to ensure we build maintainable and sustainable digital products

  • Stay up to date with, and lead the creation of standards around development practices and techniques to best enable our teams to consistently deliver at pace

  • Handle allocation of developers to teams, ensuring a good balance of personalities, skills and seniority, enabling the teams to deliver great services quickly

  • Mentor development teams, helping ensure they're building things to our standards, and identifying opportunities for collaboration

  • Advocate user-centric, agile approaches which focus on rapid, effective delivery of high quality digital services

  • Transform government into a modern, agile development centre by embedding practices like Test Driven Development, continuous deployment, and DevOps

  • Support sharing of methods and technologies across teams, government, and the industry by helping to organise events

  • Help publicise our achievements and learning through blog posts and social media

  • Build and maintain a diverse, inclusive culture across the development community, growing awareness, inclusivity, and balance

  • Participate in support during office hours, and sometimes out of hours (for which you'll be paid an allowance)

  • Work with the Head of Software Development at the department to build and maintain a diverse, inclusive culture across the development community, growing awareness, inclusivity, and balance

  • Coordinate developer hiring, shaping our in-house team, making it more diverse and inclusive

You'll have

Essential

  • Expert knowledge of current and new technologies, and knowledge of open source concepts and technologies, including of Ruby on Rails or C#.NET

  • Experience introducing practices such as Test Driven Development, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and DevOps to teams

  • Experience leading and managing technical teams to deliver user-focused services in an agile environment

  • A cloud-first approach and experience of IaaS and PaaS solutions as well as understanding infrastructure-as-code and containerisation

  • Experience of good software design principles such as OOD, SOLID and design patterns

  • Experience of RESTful API design and loosely coupled microservices architectures

  • A good understanding of web application security and awareness of the OWASP Top 10 security vulnerabilities

  • Experience of sharing knowledge, mentoring others, and working in a diverse and inclusive multi-disciplinary team

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process

  • Modern standard approach - You can use a modern standards approach to solve problems, using test driven development (TDD) techniques

  • Programming and build - You can write clear, concise and maintainable code using standard tools

  • A systematic approach to problem solving