Senior Frontend Developer - HO - G7

We are looking for people who are passionate about Engineering to join our community led team in Shared Applications Service (SAS) You will work in agile multidisciplinary teams with over 200 engineers in a modern cloud environment using the latest technologies. Our purpose as a team is to bring technical understanding in-house for over 600 Home Office applications. 

You could be creating and maintaining some of the most critical public services in the United Kingdom and transforming how we use data and technology to improve these. We are responsible for designing, building and supporting solutions to help people prove their identity or apply for visas. You could also be working on critical IT systems that support policing and counter terrorism, which helps protect UK borders. 

We are hosting an Engineering online recruitment event on 6th February 2025 12:00 - 13:00, where you can find out more about our roles, working for the organisation and how to apply. Register your interest for the online event.

Job description

The Senior Developer is key for our product delivery, you will develop core components of our solutions and help select appropriate technologies. Your subject matter expertise will enable you to operate with greater levels of autonomy and decision making.

You will work to our technical standards writing clean, secure code following a test-driven approach, ensuring the code is open as far as possible and can be re-used.

The Senior Developer will be expected to mentor and lead other engineers in technical tasks, as well as support recruitment and assessment activities. 

This role is not suitable for part-time working due to the nature of the role. 

Tools and Technologies we use: 

We are keen for Engineers to continue learning new technologies, we have a large range in the Home Office including: 

• Core Skills: React.js, JavaScript, Typescript, Vue or Angular, Node.js, jQuery, HTML, CSS, SASS
• Others: Git, Responsive Design, Accessibility, REST, Jest, Cypress, Webpack, ESLint, Secure Application Development
• Data: PostgreSQL or other RDBMS
• DevOps: AWS, Kubernetes, Azure, Jenkins, Docker, Ansible, Terraform 
• Desirable: Familiarity with Python or Java, User experience design

What you will do

Your main day to day responsibilities will be: 

• Delivering secure, reliable and scalable software, and supporting your team with technical tasks when needed.
• Evaluating and advising on design choices and ensuring that software is high quality and balances technical and business considerations.
• Defining and documenting test cases for new systems and maintaining live systems to ensure ongoing performance.
• Evolving new approaches/solutions with other professions through discoveries, maintaining a focus on development and deployment.
• Helping prioritise and direct technical tasks across your team, to balance new and live services.

Like many organisations we need to maintain our services 24/7, therefore, on occasions there may be a requirement to work out of hours, for which you will be paid an additional allowance.  

Person specification

UK residency and security requirements - You need to have lived in the UK for the past 5 years. 

Essential Criteria 

As a Senior Developer you will demonstrate passion for software engineering with the following skills or experience in: 

• Designing, reviewing, and maintaining complex software applications, components, modules and documentation (Lead essential criteria).
• Collaborating in designing, coding, testing, documents, amends, and refactoring moderately complex programs/scripts.
• Designing test cases and scripts under own direction, mapping back predetermined criteria and reporting testing outcomes.    
• Providing technical expertise to enable the configuration of system components and equipment for system tests.
• Managing and updating data systems, enabling the availability, integrity of searchability of information which can be utilised by many sources. 
• Maintaining application support processes, ensuring support requests are dealt with to agreed processes, investigating issues, and reporting findings where applicable.    

SFIA capability framework 

Skills for the Information Age (SFIA) is the technical framework that sets the standard capability and development of all engineering levels in the Home Office. This is a link to the capability framework:  All skills A–Z — English (sfia-online.org) 

We use set SFIA technical skills to form our interview questions and we will assess you against these technical skills during the selection process. 

SFIA levels of responsibility – Use the SFIA Levels of responsibility to understand what would be expected for each Technical Skill listed below.

SFIA Technical Skills 

The essential technical skills listed above are reflective of the Home Office Government Digital and Data Profession Career Framework. Please see below for the relevant skills required for your role. 

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Leadership

Technical skills

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

• Software design (SWDN) - Level 4
• Programming/software development (PROG) - Level 3
• Testing (TEST) - Level 3
• Systems integration and build (SINT) - Level 4
• Data management (DATM) - Level 4
• Application support (ASUP) - Level 4