Senior Front End Developer - DWP - SEO

Are you an advocate and expert Front-end Developer?  Capable of leading the development of products that help other teams design and deliver services? 

We’re recruiting Senior Front-End Developers to be part of both our Retirement and Bereavement and Care teams to help DWP achieve our ambitions strategic goals.

Retirement Services Team

In Retirement Services, we provide digital applications that enable citizens to apply for the benefits that support them through their retirement age. We have an exciting opportunity for a highly experienced Senior Front-end developer, who can provide technical expertise to support a wide range of systems that support the Winter Fuel, Cold Weather and other benefit systems that get used by both citizen and DWP agents. 

You should be highly proficient in working in multi-disciplinary teams using Agile delivery methodologies, and develop high quality, well designed and thoroughly tested code that forms part of the GovUk Design system. 

You will be expected to work from requirements or high-level design without the need for direct supervision. In addition, we seek someone that can continuously maintain, iterate, and improve the services, ensuring the technologies and frameworks are up to date.  As part of the role, you may be required to coach or mentor individual and apprentice developers.

Bereavement and Care team

When working within DWP Bereavement and Care you have the opportunity to positively impact some of the most vulnerable people in society building supportive and empathetically sound services and user interactions.  Our interfaces are built with the user at the heart of them. 

In Bereavement and Care we deal with delivering systems to manage and pay support payments to citizens in a time of need.  So the user interactions for these services must be supportive of people dealing with these problems by being as simple, clear and straightforward to use as possible. 

You have the opportunity to work with Node.js, Express, React and templating engines to deliver accessibility compliant UIs using well defined GDS standards.  Working with a community of frontend developers committed to building reusable templates and patterns for use throughout the department; you will be able to contribute to shared features and components. 

We use industry standard development frameworks and languages to build enterprise level systems but are always looking to bring in new and original ways into practice to help speed of delivery or robustness of software implementation. 

Job description

Our Senior Front-end Developers are experts in front-end development, with proven experience in the design and build user interfaces at scale.

You will:  

• Lead and promote the technical direction and development of reusable patterns and components.
• Have strong knowledge of modern web development stacks, web standards, user experience, progressive enhancement, performance, accessibility, browser compatibility, tooling and pipelines. Work with cross-functional teams to integrate into the back-end services to ensure that they are built to the same high standards.
• Ensure we develop accessible user interfaces for DWP services which work effectively across multiple devices and browsers.
• Use modern tooling and development techniques to write and share test-driven code iteratively delivering.
• Input into, promote and ensure design standardisation processes.
• Release, maintain and support the deployment of products and code packages.
• Coach, mentor and line manage colleagues.
• Engage with teams across different levels and capabilities.
• Be an enabler for multiple teams, driving consistency, standards, pace and quality, resolving technical blockers, and promoting re-use and collaboration through the wider communities.
• Engage with and contribute to the engineering and user-centred design communities.
• Have an excellent ability to self-organise and define priorities.
• Docker, CI and deployment of components.
• Delivery end to end testing using TDD and BDD.

Person specification

When giving details in your employment history and personal statement you should highlight your experience in line with essential criteria below:

• Lead criterion: Significant demonstrable expertise in Front-end development of large scale systems dealing with high numbers of users, transactions and business processes.
• Detailed working knowledge and extensive experience of open-source technologies including HTML, CSS, client and server-side JavaScript, TypeScriptNode.js and other modern front-end frameworks and templating languages.
• Experience in building accessible compliant user interfaces.
• Proven ability in delivering thorough unit level test coverage using common testing frameworks such as Jest or Mocha.
• Experience integrating with a wide range of technical systems including database technologies (SQL or NoSQL), caching tools such as Redis and API Microservices, all deploying into cloud-based infrastructure. (AWS or Azure).
• Influential and able to lead front-end activities, set and develop best practice for an agile team and contribute across multiple teams. You will ensure consistency whilst promoting standards as well as creating a coaching and mentoring culture.

An initial sift may be conducted using the lead criteria stated above. Candidates who pass the initial sift will progress to a full sift. 

If you would like to learn more about the role, please contact akhtar.ali1@dwp.gov.uk.