Senior 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 the 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 Senior Developer, you’ll contribute to the digital transformation of government by building and supporting high-quality digital services. You will play a key role in designing and delivering robust, scalable software solutions that meet user needs while aligning with broader GDS standards and practices.

You’ll contribute through hands-on engineering, applying modern development practices and helping build resilient, secure and maintainable services. You’ll participate in technical discussions and design decisions, helping ensure solutions are practical, well implemented and aligned with wider architectural approaches.

Senior Developers work closely with other engineers, architects, product managers and multidisciplinary teams. You’ll collaborate to solve complex technical problems, contribute to improving engineering practices and help maintain high standards of code quality, reliability and performance. You’ll thrive using agile methods and enjoy working collaboratively across teams to deliver meaningful outcomes.

Above all, you’ll want to make government services better for users, contributing to the continual improvement of the way teams build, run and evolve digital services.

As a Senior Developer, you’ll:

• contribute to improving the way the team works, supporting effective engineering practices, development workflows and collaborative approaches that help the team deliver high-quality software
• be a strong technical contributor within the team, maintaining proficiency across the systems, platforms and tools used to build and operate services
• help the team understand how different parts of the system interact, supporting the investigation and resolution of complex technical issues and enabling the team to work confidently across the broader technical landscape
• collaborate with engineers and architects to explore appropriate technologies, patterns and approaches, contributing to decisions about when new software should be written and helping ensure solutions are pragmatic, maintainable and aligned with organisational standards
• contribute to technical decision-making within the team, helping maintain a high standard of engineering quality through thoughtful design and implementation
• support and mentor other developers, sharing knowledge and helping colleagues build confidence and capability in their technical work
• participate in constructive technical discussions, contributing ideas and respectfully challenging proposals to help the team reach well-reasoned decisions
• share knowledge through collaboration, documentation, code reviews and technical discussions, helping ensure understanding is spread across the team
• apply and advocate for good engineering practices such as testing, code quality, observability, security and maintainability
• contribute to the wider engineering community within the organisation, sharing knowledge, participating in communities of practice and collaborating with other teams

Person specification

We’re interested in people who have:

• strong experience building and operating serverless services on AWS, using technologies such as Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, SQS, SNS, EventBridge and Step Functions.
• strong TypeScript and Node.js development skills, using modern tooling, testing frameworks and development practices.
• experience working with AWS services such as S3, IAM, VPC networking (ideal), SSM Parameter Store / Secrets Manager and CloudWatch.
• experience developing event-driven and asynchronous systems, integrating services through queues, events and APIs.
• experience implementing and maintaining infrastructure as code, ideally using AWS CDK.
• the ability to build secure, well-tested and maintainable services, following modern engineering practices including automated testing, CI/CD and observability.
• the ability to work across a mixture of product stages - greenfield development, evolving services into operational products, and maintaining established live services
• the ability to bring an operational mindset to development, considering reliability, observability and maintainability from the start
• the ability to work effectively as a senior engineer within a team, contributing to technical discussions and helping shape implementation approaches
• the ability to support and mentor more junior developers, helping to improve team capability and engineering practices
• experience developing and operating large-scale web services
• experience building microservice or serverless applications and/or running applications in the cloud
• the ability to rapidly research and learn new tools, techniques and paradigms to solve technical problems
• the ability to use testing, prototyping and discovery techniques to validate ideas and inform development decisions
• experience working in agile environments and iterating on both software and team processes
• a good understanding of security considerations in operational services from end to end
• experience building robust and accessible systems that work for as many users as possible
• the ability to be comfortable contributing to technical discussions and evaluating technology choices with their team
• the ability to apply and promote engineering practices such as Test Driven Development (TDD), continuous integration, continuous delivery and DevOps methodologies

Benefits

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 only ask for a CV, response to 1 knockout question and a security check question Important tip - please ensure that your responses include how you meet the skills and experience listed in the “person specification” section above
• a 20 minute telephone interview (may not be required depending on the volume of applicants)
• a 45 minute pair programming technical exercise - you'll work with a GDS engineer to solve a self-contained programming problem given to you in writing. You'll be asked to discuss the problem with the GDS engineer, devise a plan for solving it, and then to write code to solve the problem. As well as your programming and unit testing skills we'll be evaluating how you communicate and collaborate, and how you break down the problem. You'll use your own development environment for this (conducted over video conferencing)
• a 60 minute face-to-face interview (conducted over video conferencing)

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

• strong experience building and operating serverless services on AWS, using technologies such as Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, SQS, SNS, EventBridge and Step Functions

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 Digital, Data and Technology Profession Capability Framework for the Senior 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

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.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status or disability status.

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

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

Recruitment Timeline

Sift completion: 24th April 2026

Phone Screens: 5th May 2026

Panel interviews:

• technical interviews: 12th May 2026 onwards
• panel interviews: 19th May 2026 onwards

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.

Security:

Successful candidates must pass a disclosure and barring security check.

Please note that this role requires SC clearance, which would normally need 5 years’ UK residency in the past 5 years. This is not an absolute requirement, but supplementary checks may be needed where individuals have not lived in the UK for that period. This may mean your security clearance (and therefore your appointment) will take longer or, in some cases, not be possible.

For meaningful checks to be carried out, you will need to have lived in the UK for a sufficient period of time, to enable appropriate checks to be carried out and produce a result which provides the required level of assurance. Whilst a lack of UK residency in itself is not necessarily a bar to a security clearance, and expectation of UK residency may range from 3 to 5 years. Failure to meet the residency requirements needed for the role may result in the withdrawal of provisional jobs offers.

Location:

Whilst this role's location is Manchester, if you are a current Civil servant working in DSIT and based in London/Bristol you are also able to apply for this role. If you are successful, you will retain your current location and pay.

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.

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.