Senior Developer

Job summary

The Insolvency Service is a leading government agency which plays a crucial role in providing essential services to the public and to business. The work we do is important to the proper functioning of markets, the economy in general and support for thousands of people each year who are in financial difficulty.

We have an exciting opportunity for a talented, enthusiastic Senior .net Developer within the Insolvency Service Digital Services team working on a programme of work to maintain, improve and modernise our line-of-business applications.

Inclusive and diverse teams are important to us. We welcome and encourage applications from everyone, including groups underrepresented in our workforce. The Insolvency Service strives to ensure that the agency is a safe, inclusive, and welcoming place for everybody to bring their true self to work and to help the agency to achieve its diversity objectives. We have 9 active employee network groups available to join or become an ally, these include, Carers Network, Disability network group, Employee Assistance, Representatives, FACES Network Group, LGBT+, Mind Matters, Part Time Workers, The Shed - Men’s Network Group and Women’s Network Group.

We value capability, technical skills and experience and we place great emphasis on lifetime development to support our people. We encourage our employees to become more involved in areas they feel strongly about, whether it be for the benefit of the agency, through our Engagement network or in their own local communities via volunteering opportunities.

The Insolvency Service is a great place to work, learn and grow your career!

If you would like to find out more about the role, the team and what it's like to work at the Insolvency Service, we are holding a Hiring Manager Q&A session for this role where you can virtually meet the team on 5th October at 16.00-17.00. Please click here to reserve your place.

Job description

The successful candidate will be working on the Digital Service team (part of the Change Technology Services within the Insolvency Service) responsible for enterprise line-of-business applications used by both internal and external organisations as well as the general public.

We are consolidating our technology stack and moving away from legacy services to focus on the use Microsoft's .net 10 framework and Azure services, so this is a fantastic opportunity to help shape our technology and the way we work for a sustainable, user-centric future. We would love to for you to be part of that new team.

Responsibilities

Software Development:

• design, develop and maintain application code
• implement functionality that satisfies agreed user stories and acceptance criteria
• ensure solutions are secure, accessible, performant and maintainable
• participate in architectural and technical discussions
• contribute to the continuous improvement of products and services

Quality Engineering:

• create and maintain automated unit and integration tests
• take ownership of code quality and defect prevention
• participate in peer reviews and provide constructive feedback
• follow agreed coding standards and development practices
• address technical debt and quality concerns where identified
• support defect investigation and resolution

Agile Delivery:

• participate fully in Agile ceremonies
• contribute to estimation, planning and forecasting activities
• keep work items up to date and communicate progress clearly
• escalate blockers and risks through appropriate channels
• support the team in achieving sprint and delivery objectives

Standards, Patterns and Practices:

• contribute to the development and evolution of engineering standards
• promote reuse of shared components, libraries and services
• support the adoption of common patterns and development approaches
• share knowledge and lessons learned with colleagues
• contribute to Communities of Practice and technical discussions

Operational Support:

• assist in the investigation and resolution of production incidents
• provide third-line support where required
• monitor application health and identify improvement opportunities
• support releases, deployments and post-release activities
• ensure application documentation remains accurate and up to date

Person specification

To be successful in this role, you should have:

• an understanding of a number of integration implementations including real-time, scheduled, API, batch and messaging services
• experience of IaaS and PaaS solutions
• an understanding of the importance of good documentation
• enthusiasm for sharing knowledge and mentoring others, supporting the team and nurturing its growth
• knowledge and experience of modern development practices such as BDD and TDD, CI/CD, and DevOps, modern development workflows, ideally using GitHub, as well as an understanding of modern design principles such as clean architecture, OOP, SOLID, RESTful APIs
• a good understanding of web application security and awareness of the OWASP Top 10 security vulnerabilities
• good analytical and problem solving skills to be able identify and solve software defects

Essential Criteria

• C# / .NET.
• Cloud experience
• Test Driven Development (TDD)
• Integration patterns
• Strong problem-solving skills
• Good communication skills
• Agile delivery experience

Desirable Criteria

• Azure
• Azure PaaS
• Clean Architecture
• Government experience
• GDS tooling knowledge

Behaviours

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

• Developing Self and Others
• Making Effective Decisions

Technical skills

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

• Candidates will be asked to take part in a coding exercise at interview.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £48,429, Insolvency Service contributes £14,029 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).

We want you to have a good work-life balance and want to support you in all that you do, so we offer a great benefits package including:

• flexible working arrangements and flexi-time
• full time new entrants to the Civil Service and those Civil Servants on modernised terms and conditions will be entitled to 25 days leave increasing on a sliding scale to 30 days after 5 years’ service
• in addition to this you are entitled to 8 public/bank holidays plus an additional day of privilege leave
• competitive maternity, paternity and parental leave
• 5 days paid leave for learning and development
• 5 days paid for volunteering