Senior Software Engineer - Front End - EXT

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.

This campaign is for external candidates who wish to be based at either our Newport or Tichfield site. Therefore this campaign has been linked with the internal advert 460910 Senior Software Engineer - Front End. If you are an internal candidate to ONS please apply via the other campaign.The selection and interview process will be combined, so you do not need to apply to both campaigns.

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.

The ONS Design System has been developed to help teams deliver digital services that are consistent, accessible, and user centred, while reducing duplication of effort and speeding up delivery. Components developed within the Design System are used for all public-facing ONS sites including Census 2031, Survey Data Collection, and the new Website which is launching in 2026.

Responsibilities

The role will include:

• Maintaining the Design System, triaging and prioritising fixes and improvements in collaboration with the Product and Delivery Manager.

• Collaborating with User Research, Interaction Design, and stakeholders to understand the context for improvements to the Design System.

• Support web accessibility and web page performance.

• Contributing to improvements in related products, and in the team's ways of working.

• Technologies used within the team include: CSS, JavaScript, Nunjucks, Node, GitHub, some full stack development (terraform, config), HTML, WCAG and web standards, Craft CMS.

Person specification

Essential Skills Criteria

You will be working as a Front-end Software Engineer on the team. Key skills include:

• Software Engineer (Practitioner): Collaborates with others when necessary to review specifications. 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.

• Test engineering (Practitioner): Able to design, implement and execute a wide range of functional and non-functional testing techniques and to standardise their application across team. Able to make decisions on running types of test cases, and environments for testing. Able to raise defects with the business and help prioritise them based on defect severity. Develops, extends and maintains reusable test frameworks and tooling; maintains and adapts CI/CD pipelines to ensure effective test integration and quality gates. Guides and coaches others to create and maintain comprehensive standards and compliant automated tests, while researching future tools, methodologies and techniques.

• 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 colleagues.

• User focus (Practitioner): Able to collaborate with user researchers and can represent users internally. Understands the difference between user needs and desires of the user. Able to champion user research to focus on all users. Can prioritise and defines approaches to understand the user story, guiding others in doing so. Can offer recommendations on the best tools and methods to be used.

Behaviours

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

• Working Together

• 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.