Senior Developer (Java)

Job summary

Discover a career in your hands at HMRC. Whether you're seeking purpose, growth, or a workplace that gives you a true sense of belonging, hear from some of our employees as they share their story about what it’s really like to work at HMRC.

Visit our YouTube channel to watch the full series and come and discover your potential.

At HMRC we are committed to creating a great place to work for all our colleagues; an inclusive and respectful environment that reflects the diversity of the society we serve.

We want to maximise the potential of everyone who chooses to work for us, and we offer a range of flexible working patterns and support to make a fulfilling career at HMRC accessible to you.

Diverse perspectives and experiences are critical to our success, and we welcome applications from all people from all backgrounds with the experience and skills needed to perform this role.

• Have you got a working knowledge of Java?
• Can you identify, triage and fix defects?
• Are you great at offering support and mentoring others?

If yes we would like you to be part of our outstanding team within Chief Digital Product Office, Digital Services.

Our purpose is to drive a customer centric approach to transforming services for HMRC Customers. Working closely with business stakeholders, contractors and suppliers - our aim is to drive digital innovation and to re-engineer services aligned to our IT, contractual and sourcing strategies and to deliver significantly improved digital services.

Job description

You will be a key member of an Agile Scrum Team working across our Digital Application Support Service teams who are responsible for HMRC Self-Assessment digital service, ensuring users are able to get their tax right.

The team support customers, delivering change, enhancement and support for high-volume, business-critical HMRC digital service using Java.

Working as part of a scrum team you will have a key role in designing, building, and maintaining services that have a positive impact on over 12m users across HMRC.

Person specification

Key responsibilities of this role include:

• Plan and lead development activities supporting legislative changes, service enhancements, maintenance and problem resolution within strict timescales.
• Put users first, translating user needs and user stories into effective technical solutions.
• Develop and maintain deep knowledge of the wider service architecture and support the development of others.
• Operate and support the live services you build, using monitoring and observability tools.
• Contribute to deployment activities and take ownership of production releases.
• Proactively improve service resilience, stability, scalability and maintainability.
• Support and mentor less experienced developers within the team.
• Contribute to a culture of continuous improvement and engineering excellence.

Essential Criteria:

• Working as part of an agile software delivery team, leading on aspects of development work, providing guidance and setting development direction for more junior members of a team.
• Demonstrable working experience using Java 8 or newer and Spring Framework to deliver user-centred digital services.
• Demonstrable experience planning and leading development on related user stories.
• Experience of DevOps practices such as CI/CD (unit testing, TDD, Jenkins, Git, or similar).
• Evidence of taking ownership of risks and technical debt and ensuring they’re prioritised within the team alongside stakeholders.
• Problem solving and delivering a range of possible solutions, including through technical work and process improvement.
• Experience of evaluating data against business rules through rules engines such as Apache KiE – Drools.
• Operating a live service, using observability tooling such as Kibana, Grafana and Google Tag Manager, managing live incidents within an ITIL Framework.
• Knowledge of web security best practices, such as OWASP top 10.
• Experience of working with tools for API, performance, accessibility and security testing.

Desirable Criteria:

• Working knowledge of the Digital Application Support Services - Self Assessment application.
• Oracle Certified Professional Qualification.
• ITIL4 Foundation Qualification or be prepared to obtain it.
• Flexibility to work outside of normal business hours during Key Business Events.
• Working knowledge of GOV.UK Service Standard.
• Holds enhanced security vetting to SC level or be prepared to obtain it.
• Experience of working alongside Database Administrators (DBAs) to support in the diagnosis and resolution of data problems, sharing best practice on SQL queries.

Further Location Information

Please ensure that you only apply for a location that you are willing and able to work from, as we will only make one offer of employment. Any additional notes included in a ‘Further Location Preferences (optional)’ field within the application form, will not be considered. Please be aware that you cannot change your location preference after submitting your application.

Office closures

For more information on where you might be working, review this information on our locations.

If your location preference is for one of the following sites, it’s important to note that these are not long-term sites for HMRC and we will require you to move to a new building in the future, subject to our location strategy and the applicable employee policies at that time.

These sites include:

• Telford Plaza, Telford - moving to Parkside Court, Telford

You will be given more information about what this means at the job offer stage.

Behaviours

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

• Changing and Improving
• Delivering at Pace
• Working Together

Technical skills

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

• You will be provided a scenario at interview where we would like you to demonstrate your experience and the approach you would take to the problem. You will be asked to talk through your approach and may be asked follow-up questions.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £45,544, HM Revenue and Customs contributes £13,194 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).

HMRC operates both Flexible and Hybrid Working policies, allowing you to balance your work and personal commitments. We welcome applications from those who need to work a more flexible arrangement and will agree to requests where possible, considering our operational and customer service needs.

We offer a generous leave allowance, starting at 25 days and increasing by a day for every year of qualifying service up to a maximum of 30 days.

• Pension - We make contributions to our colleagues’ Alpha pension equal to at least 28.97% of their salary.
• Family friendly policies.
• Personal support.
• Coaching and development.

To find out more about HMRC