Senior Frontend Developer - The National Archives - SEO

Archives are special. As a home of our collective memory, The National Archives plays a unique role. We hold records of events of national and international importance as well as documents that speak to our everyday lives, over the last one thousand years.

We’re looking for an enthusiastic and highly skilled Senior Frontend Developer to help shape and grow our frontend capability. Presenting The National Archives on the web is both challenging and endlessly fascinating, we develop services that work for the user, however complex the underlying systems may be. We believe that ensuring things work for end users is the only way to realise the efficiencies that come with digital transformation. The scale of the collection, diversity of audiences and variety of user needs, makes developing our digital services a challenge like no other. With your excellent coding skills, passion for accessibility and progressive enhancement your job is to ensure standards are defined, maintained and shared to help turn the ambition of being an archive for everyone into a user’s experience.

Job description

Full job description attached on the Civil Service Jobs website.

Person specification

This is a full time post. However, requests for part-time working, flexible working and job share will be considered, taking into account at all times the operational needs of the Department. A combination of onsite and home working is available and applicants should be able to regularly travel to our Kew site for a minimum of 60% of their work time.

How to apply:

If you are an internal applicant: please do not use the link on this page. Please apply via your employee Workday account.

If you are an external applicant: to submit your application please click the 'Apply at advertiser's site' button on this page.

You will be asked to provide details of your work experience and write a personal statement. In your personal statement please explain, using examples, how you meet the essential criteria given below. You may draw on knowledge, skills, abilities, experience gained from paid work, domestic responsibilities, education, leisure interests and voluntary activities. Please note selection for interview will largely be based on the information you provide in this section.

Essential Criteria:

• Significant experience coding clear, usable, accessible digital interfaces that work across a range of devices and browsers, which meet the latest WCAG standards at level AA.
• Excellent skills in the fundamental frontend technologies - HTML, CSS (including pre-processors such as SASS) and JavaScript to create clean code that is open by default and easy for others to reuse.
• Excellent experience of front-end development in Python using frameworks such as Django and Flask.
• Modern development approaches including Agile (such as Scrum and Kanban) and Test-Driven development; version control with Git.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical issues and concepts to non-specialists and to provide advice and guidance based on experience and sound judgment. Work collaboratively in the open and proactively share knowledge.
• Experience of mentoring, coaching and supporting developers with both technical and non-technical aspects of their career development
• Excellent ability to analyse and problem solve, understand new concepts and quickly assimilate the details of complex systems.
• Experience of User Centred Design with the ability to take ideas from concept through to completion to create services which meet user needs in a way that is clear for all audiences.

 Desirable Criteria:

• Experience of delivering digital services in accordance with GDS Service Manual and Technology Code of Practice.
• Good understanding of version control with Git and GitHub.
• Knowledge of implementing and consuming APIs.
• Experience of developing applications hosted on Amazon Web Services.
• DevOps skills including experience of configuring CI/CD pipelines.
• Understanding of containerisation using Docker and microservice architecture.
• Data technologies and standards such as JSON, SQL, XSLT, XML Schema with an understanding of data structures including document, graph and relational models.