Senior Software Engineer - EXT

Location

The ONS operates an adaptable hybrid working model across the UK, with colleagues linked to one of our contractual locations working between office and remote throughout the week. The locations for this role are Newport and Titchfield (Fareham).

All colleagues are required to work from their contractually allocated site for at least 40% of their working time.

The induction process for the role will be conducted in person.

Job summary

Are you an accomplished Software Engineer looking for a role where you can make a real impact, using your technical experience to enable us to deliver our Statistics for the Public Good strategy for the UK?

We are looking for an experienced Software Engineer to join us. We are looking for forward-thinking people with a passion for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery working on the latest cloud and software applications. You will have an eye for detail and stakeholder management skills to provide technical and procedural expertise working within our Digital Services (DS) Directorate.

A bit about Digital Applications

This division is responsible for the ongoing development and support of numerous statistical services and products that are core to the ONS. These include some of our newer products as well as some of our more legacy platforms and systems. We work with the business areas to provide enhancements as well as delivery of new products and services to enable their business benefit with their user’s needs at the forefront. We utilise various tools and technologies to do this and engage with a number of external suppliers to provide a secure and stable set of services and products.

What we do

Within the Digital Applications Division, we enable survey design and deliver the collection, survey delivery and critical processing of survey data, ensuring systems are reliable and support the end-to-end flow of data, while continuously improving our suite of products.

Our teams focus on maintaining high-performing live services, while also driving the modernisation of our technology estate and reduction of legacy systems, helping to create more efficient and sustainable platforms.

Who we work with

Given the nature of the live systems and applications we are supporting we work with users across ONS every day. Generally, colleagues outside of Digital Services undertake the Product Owner and Senior User roles and we work collaboratively with them to define the future roadmap of enhancements and priorities for development.

Job description

A Software Engineer designs, develops, runs, tests and improve software that meets the user’s needs. They are responsible for writing clean, secure code following a test-driven approach. They create a code that is open by default and easy for others to use. A senior developer delivers and integrates complicated or higher risk software to form a complete service.

Responsibilities

The role will include:

• Develop and enhance software solutions to meet user story needs.

• Follow best practice guidelines and help to improve those guidelines.

• Write clean, secure, and well-tested code.

• Coach and mentor colleagues.

• Support a continuous delivery environment, using effective delivery and deployment techniques

• Operate the services they build and identify issues in production.

• Design and execute a range of test techniques.

Person specification

Essential Skills Criteria

• Programming and build (software engineering) (Practitioner) – Collaborates with others when necessary to review specifications and uses these agreed specifications to design, code, test and document programs or scripts of medium to high complexity, using the right standards and tools. Contributes to code reviews and gives constructive feedback to others.

• Systems Design (Practitioner) - Designs systems characterised by medium levels of risk, impact and business or technical complexity. Selects appropriate design standards, methods and tools and ensures they are applied effectively. Reviews the systems designs of others to ensure selection of appropriate technology, efficient use of resources and integration of multiple systems and technology. Communicating with business and technical colleagues to understand the bigger picture in order to elicit requirements.

• Test Engineering (Practitioner) – Able to design, implement and execute a wide range of functional and non-functional testing techniques. Able to effectively communicate test results to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Able to make decisions on running types of, and environments for testing. Able to raise defects with the business and help prioritise them based on defect severity. Able to think outside the box, ask the right questions and critically evaluate findings. Leads investigative work into problems and opportunities with existing processes, driving the collection of information and creation of recommendations for improvements. Can absorb large amounts of conflicting information and use it to determine solutions.

• Modern Standards Approach (Expert) – High understanding and application of the most appropriate modern standards and practices. Takes responsibility for developing and refining standards and coaching and guiding others.

• Service Support (Practitioner) - Identifies, locates, and competently fixes faults. Able to investigate undocumented issues and develop fixes. Can triage issues and build stories for more involved issues, document processes and support more junior colleagues

Behaviours

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

• Changing and Improving

• Managing a Quality Service

• Delivering at Pace

Technical skills

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

• Programming and Build (Practitioner)

• Test Engineering (Practitioner)

• Service Support (Practitioner)

• Communication between technical and non-technical (Practitioner)

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £44,050, Office for National Statistics contributes £12,761 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

The Office for National Statistics is part of the Civil Service, and as such we share a number of key benefits with other departments, whilst also having our own unique offerings to support our valued colleagues across the organisation.