Senior Software Engineer

Overview

At Scottish Government, we don't just employ people; we’re building a family. Your influence will not go unnoticed and will help to shape our organisation's future!

Would you like to build and run the platforms that underpin public services in Scotland? In the cloud and platform services division, our mission is to design, build, and operate a Scottish Government platform for Public Sector bodies across Scotland, providing: Cloud Computing, Digital Payments, and Digital Identity. By establishing common platforms, we support organisational transformation, allowing bodies to deliver their services more efficiently, more quickly, and at scale.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will have broad software development expertise and will understand the goals and strategy behind each project from inception to running as a live service. This will involve providing technical expertise at the project level and responsibility for successful delivery of individual applications or components.

HOW DOES IT FEEL TO WORK HERE?

Adam Barclay, Software Engineering Manager - "I've found the Scottish Government to be a supportive working environment and appreciate that my colleagues are all working towards a common goal. As someone who was previously employed in the private sector, I enjoy having the opportunity to work on software projects that will have a positive impact on the lives of people in Scotland."

Hear from colleagues discussing Digital Careers at Scottish Government.

HOW WILL I SPEND MY TIME?

As a senior software engineer you will contribute to the development of our secure, scalable, and resilient software platforms. You will use your expertise to advise on the technical direction of the solution, review code, and mentor junior members of the team to make sure a high standard is maintained. As part of a cross functional agile team, you will be responsible for the whole of the software development lifecycle, including interpreting the requirements, writing unit and integration tests, coding the solution, and automating infrastructure creation, software deployment, and monitoring.

You would be joining at an exciting time where we are investing in growing our team and supporting colleagues’ professional development to broaden their skills while increasing their depth of knowledge with the latest technologies.

What technologies will you use?

Our services and applications run on AWS using Kubernetes, backend services are written in Java, with Node JS and Typescript used for front end applications. Persistence is provided by S3, DynamoDB and Redis. We use Grafana/Prometheus for metrics and dashboarding; and Gitlab for CI/CD. The cloud platform team operate both an AWS and Azure platform.

Responsibilities

Your responsibilities will include:

A Senior Developer delivers and integrates software to form a complete service. Senior developers plan and lead development on sets of related stories; have an understanding of the whole system and take responsibility for teaching this to others. They work with other disciplines to understand what needs to be built, coach and mentor more junior colleagues, operate the production services they build and find ways to improve system robustness, resilience and stability

Additional Duties

Strategic

• Set the architectural vision for a component
• Regularly reflect on the capabilities and maturity in your engineering team and contribute to the process of continuous improvement
• Promote the highest professional standards to lead and educate more junior team members

Operational

Working with others:

• Collaborate with delivery teams and partners to break technical requirements down into appropriate pieces
• Collaborate with external suppliers to ensure that their system architectures meet our requirements, including: application design and integration points
• Work with the design & UX team to deliver usable, accessible solutions that meet users’ needs and exceed user expectations

Team process:

• Lead and participate in the planning and prioritising of software delivery
• Continuously improve development and integration processes
• Choose and apply a variety of software methods from agile and lean to day-to-day development

Technical leadership in the team:

• Lead the design and implementation of robust, scalable, open and secure systems ensuring delivery to the highest standard
• Lead and mentor more junior developers
• Provide advice and consultancy to other engineers in areas of special technical expertise (e.g. security, data engineering, build and deployment etc)
• Select appropriate technologies such as whether to use low code solutions, which cloud technologies, and database choice

Technical delivery:

• Understand and capture business problems and produce technical solutions to them
• Write software, across the entire software development life cycle, using a variety of software design patterns
• Directly deliver and operate, and guide others in the delivery and operation of, software solutions in a complex environment
• Use automation, continuous delivery and continuous deployment practices to deploy high quality applications on a consistent schedule
• Write infrastructure as code for the deployment of software on the cloud

Running production services:

• Design and implement monitoring and alerting to provide sufficient indication of performance and any issues in production systems
• Operate production systems, detecting any issues, identifying the cause, finding resolutions and implementing fixes

Secure development:

• Work with security architects on the design and implementation of threat mitigations
• Develop systems with security and privacy built in from the start

WHAT IMPACT WILL I HAVE?

Looking back on a successful first year you can take pride knowing your work has made life easier for public sector colleagues and the people of Scotland; delivering a scalable, modern, accessible platform which is valued by a rapidly ever-growing user base.

COMPETENCIES

• Communications and Engagement
• Improving Performance
• Analysis and Use of Evidence
• Leading Others

If invited to any interview or assessment the panel will be looking for evidence of how you meet the above competencies. More details on these are available in the Person_Specification_Band_C Updated Aug23 (V2)

Essential Criteria & Qualifications

No formal qualifications are required for this role. We would love you to apply if you meet the following essential criteria. If you would like to chat first, please get in touch

• Designing, implementing and managing complex service components to ensure they meet business needs and performance targets including security, resilience and scalability
• Contributing to the continual improvement of team delivery and capability through activities including mentoring, sharing of technical expertise on areas of expertise and application of agile software development practices
• Hands on experience or in-depth understanding of continuous delivery and deployment. Experience with continuous integration tools (e.g. Gitlab), version control (e.g.Git)
• Experience in developing modern high traffic web applications (with two or more of C#, Java, Python, typescript or JavaScript) and deploying these using infrastructure as code in a cloud environment (e.g. Azure)

WHAT WE CAN OFFER YOU

A meaningful and rewarding career, a collaborative culture and support for your career goals, while promoting a healthy work-life balance. We offer a valuable range of benefits to attract, develop and retain the best talent. These include:

• Salary between £56,020 to £69,846
• £5000 Digital (DDaT) Pay Supplement after a 3-month qualifying period ***
• Generous Pension Scheme with employer contributions ranging from 26.6% to 30.3%
• Flexible working arrangements including compressed hours and flexi time, with potential to accrue up to 4 days off a month
• 36.5 Days Annual Leave - including public and privilege holidays. This increases to 41.5 days after 4 year service.

Digital (DDaT) Pay Supplement:

This post attracts a £5000 DDAT pay supplement after a 3 months DDaT competency qualifying period. Pay supplements are temporary payments and are subject to regular review. To learn more about our full range of benefits, please visit our career's page

REMOTE WORKING

We operate a flexible location policy, with a contractual named base in Scotland of either Atlantic Quay (Glasgow) or Victoria Quay (Edinburgh).

The team currently works on a hybrid basis and are fully flexible. We meet in person when it is useful to do so, such as a divisional away day. If you wish, you can work throughout the week at the base office (or another Scottish Government office subject to availability). Commuting costs to the named base office are not reimbursed.

While staff are assigned to the base office, there may be a need for travel to other Scottish Government offices/other locations depending on assigned work.