Lead Developer

Job summary

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is the digital centre of government. We are responsible for setting, leading and delivering the vision for a modern digital government.

Our priorities are to drive a modern digital government, by:

1. joining up public sector services
2. harnessing the power of AI for the public good
3. strengthening and extending our digital and data public infrastructure
4. elevating leadership and investing in talent
5. funding for outcomes and procuring for growth and innovation
6. committing to transparency and driving accountability

We are home to the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (I.AI), the world-leading GOV.UK and at the forefront of coordinating the UK’s geospatial strategy and activity. We lead the Government Digital and Data function and champion the work of digital teams across government.

We’re part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and employ more than 1,000 people all over the UK, with hubs in Manchester, London and Bristol.

The Government Digital Service is where talent translates into impact. From your first day, you’ll be working with some of the world’s most highly-skilled digital professionals, all contributing their knowledge to make change on a national scale.

Join us for rewarding work that makes a difference across the UK. You'll solve some of the nation’s highest-priority digital challenges, helping millions of people access services they need.

Data Services for Personalised GOV.UK Channels

This role will be part of a new team at GDS, the focus specifically on developing the services that abstracts personalised data logistics for product teams, enabling them to deliver personalised features without worrying about underlying cross government data complexity.

The work is split into four main areas, data exchange between departments, a serverless platform to power the GOV.UK personalised channels, a platform to store GOV.UK personalised channel data and providing support for a new government digital mailbox. Reporting into an Engineering Manager, you’ll work within and support the wider engineering teams as well as collaborate with peers including Technical Architects to deliver a user-centric, highly scalable, resilient, and performant platform.

It is expected that this role will involve outreach to other government departments, so an ability to communicate to a wide set of stakeholders, along with the ability to manage many work streams concurrently is a must.

Job description

As a GDS Lead Developer, you’ll share responsibility for the digital transformation of government. You will provide technical leadership within the teams and services you work on, helping to shape and deliver robust, scalable software solutions that meet user needs while aligning with broader GDS standards and goals.

You’ll lead by example through hands-on engineering, promoting modern development practices and supporting teams to build resilient, secure and maintainable services. You’ll help guide technical decisions, ensuring solutions are practical, well-implemented and aligned with the wider architecture and strategy.

Lead Developers often work across teams and services, collaborating closely with architects, product managers and multidisciplinary teams. You’ll support developers in solving complex technical problems, improving engineering practices and maintaining high standards of code quality, reliability and performance. You’ll thrive using agile methods and enjoy working collaboratively across departments to deliver meaningful outcomes.

Above all, you’ll want to make government services better for users, continually improving the way teams build, run and evolve digital services.

As a Lead Developer, you’ll:

• guide and improve the ways in which the team works, helping establish effective engineering practices, development workflows and collaborative approaches that enable the team to deliver high-quality software
• act as a strong technical contributor within the team, maintaining proficiency across the systems, platforms and tools used to build and operate services
• support the team in understanding how different parts of the system interact, helping troubleshoot complex technical issues and ensuring the team can work confidently across the broader technical landscape
• work with engineers and architects to identify appropriate technologies, patterns and approaches, helping determine when new software should be written and ensuring solutions are pragmatic, maintainable and aligned with organisational standards
• provide day-to-day technical leadership within the team, helping guide technical decisions and ensuring the team maintains a high standard of engineering quality
• coach and mentor developers, supporting their technical growth and helping them develop strong engineering judgement and confidence in their work
• encourage constructive technical discussions and ensure that ideas can be challenged respectfully, helping the team reach well-reasoned decisions
• promote knowledge sharing across the team through collaboration, documentation, code reviews and technical discussions, ensuring that knowledge is not siloed with individuals
• help drive the adoption of good engineering practices such as testing, code quality, observability, security and maintainability
• contribute to the wider engineering and developer community within the organisation, sharing knowledge, participating in communities of practice and supporting cross-team collaboration

Person specification

We’re interested in people who have:

• leadership experience in designing, building and operating scalable cloud-native distributed systems in production environments.
• strong TypeScript and Node.js development skills, using modern tooling, testing frameworks and development practices.
• experience building and operating services in at least one major cloud platform (AWS preferred).
• experience designing event-driven and asynchronous architectures, integrating services through APIs, queues and events.
• strong understanding of cloud architecture, networking, security, observability and operational best practices.
• experience implementing and maintaining infrastructure as code.
• ability to build secure, well-tested and maintainable services, following modern engineering practices including automated testing, CI/CD and observability.
• experience developing and operating large-scale web services, with a strong focus on reliability, resilience and operational excellence.
• ability to provide technical leadership, set technical direction and contribute to long-term technical roadmaps.
• experience working effectively across multiple teams and complex programmes of work.
• experience mentoring and coaching engineers, helping to improve team capability and engineering standards.
• ability to work across a range of product stages, from greenfield development through to live service operation and continuous improvement.
• comfortable contributing to senior technical discussions, evaluating technology choices and balancing trade-offs around security, scalability, cost and maintainability.
• ability to rapidly learn and evaluate new technologies, tools and approaches.
• apply and promote engineering practices such as Test Driven Development (TDD), continuous integration, continuous delivery and DevOps methodologies.

If you meet a few of those criteria but think that you might not meet every last one then don’t let that stop you from submitting an application.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £69,675, Government Digital Service contributes £20,184 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

There are many benefits of working at GDS, including:

• flexible hybrid working with flexi-time and the option to work part-time or condensed hours
• a Civil Service Pension with an average employer contribution of 28.97%
• 25 days of annual leave, increasing by a day each year up to a maximum of 30 days
• an extra day off for the King’s birthday
• an in-year bonus scheme to recognise high performance
• career progression and coaching, including a training budget for personal development
• a focus on wellbeing with access to an employee assistance programme
• job satisfaction from making government services easier to use and more inclusive for people across the UK
• advances on pay, including for travel season tickets
• death in service benefits
• cycle to work scheme and facilities
• access to an employee discounts scheme
• 10 learning days per year
• volunteering opportunities (5 special leave days per year)
• access to a suite of learning activities through Civil Service learning

Any move to Government Digital Service from another employer will mean you can no longer access childcare vouchers. This includes moves between government departments. You may however be eligible for other government schemes, including Tax Free Childcare. Determine your eligibility at https://www.childcarechoices.gov.uk

Office attendance
The Department operates a discretionary hybrid working policy, which provides for a combination of working hours from your place of work and from your home in the UK. The current expectation for staff is to attend the office or non-home based location for 40-60% of the time over the accounting period.
DSIT does not normally offer full home working (i.e. working at home); but we do offer a variety of flexible working options (including occasionally working from home).

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

The standard selection process for roles at GDS consists of:

• A simple application screening process. We ask for a CV and one role specific question and one security question.
• a 20 minute phone screen where you will be asked a few role-related questions to enable us to get to know you better (may not be required depending on the volume of applications)
• a 2 hour face-to-face interview including a presentation/interactive white board exercise (conducted over video conferencing)

Depending on how many applications we get, there might also be an extra stage before the video interview, for example a phone interview or a technical exercise.

While we value the use of AI technology to enhance our daily work, we also value the personal touch and urge applicants to write cover letters without the use of AI to emphasise their own unique experiences.

In the event we receive a high volume of applications, we will conduct the initial sift against the lead criteria which is:

• leadership experience in designing, building and operating scalable cloud-native distributed systems in production environments.

In the Civil Service, we use Success Profiles to evaluate your skills and ability. This gives us the best possible chance of finding the right person for the job, increases performance and improves diversity and inclusivity. We’ll be assessing your technical abilities, skills, experience and behaviours that are relevant to this role.

For this role we’ll be assessing you against the following Civil Service Behaviours:

• communicating and influencing
• managing a quality service
• making effective decisions
• leadership
• developing self and others
• seeing the bigger picture

We’ll also be assessing your experience and specialist technical skills against the following skills defined in the Government Digital and Data Capability Framework for the Lead Developer role:

• Availability and capacity management
• Development process optimisation
• Information security
• Modern development standards
• Programming and build (software engineering)
• Prototyping
• Service support
• Systems design
• Systems integration
• User focus

Want to know more about who Government Digital and Data are? Click Here

Recruitment Timeline

Sift completion: 10/07/2026

Tech and Panel interviews: W/C 20/07/2026

Candidates that do not pass the interview but have demonstrated an acceptable standard may be considered for similar roles at a lower grade.

A reserve list will be held for a period of 12 months, from which further appointments can be made.

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan and the Civil Service D&I Strategy.

Sponsorship

DSIT cannot offer Visa sponsorship to candidates through this campaign. DSIT holds a Visa sponsorship licence but this can only be used for certain roles and this campaign does not qualify.

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check.Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is security check (opens in a new window).

See our vetting charter (opens in a new window).People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

Nationality requirements

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window).The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.

Diversity and Inclusion

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see theCivil Service People Plan (opens in a new window) and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (opens in a new window).

Apply and further information

This vacancy is part of the Great Place to Work for Veterans (opens in a new window) initiative.The Civil Service welcomes applications from people who have recently left prison or have an unspent conviction. Read more about prison leaver recruitment (opens in new window).Once this job has closed, the job advert will no longer be available. You may want to save a copy for your records.

Contact point for applicants

Job contact :

• Name : gdsrecruitment@dsit.gov.uk
• Email : gdsrecruitment@dsit.gov.uk

Recruitment team

• Email : gdsrecruitment@dsit.gov.uk

Further information

If you feel your application has not been treated in accordance with the Recruitment Principles and you wish to make a complaint, you should contact gds-complaints@dsit.gov.uk in the first instance.

If you are not satisfied with the response you receive you can contact the Civil Service Commission by email: info@csc.gov.uk Or in writing: Civil Service Commission, Room G/8 1 Horse Guards Road, London, SW1A 2HQ.