Software Engineer - Front End

Job summary

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK’s largest producer of official statistics, covering a range of key economic, social and demographic topics. These include measuring changes in the value of the UK economy, estimating the size, geographic distribution and characteristics of the population, and providing indicators of price inflation, employment, earnings, crime and migration.

Are you an accomplished Software Engineer looking for a role where you can make a real impact, using your technical experience to enable us to deliver our Statistics for the Public Good strategy for the UK?

We are looking for a Software Engineer to join us. We are looking for forward-thinking people with a passion for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery working on the latest cloud and software applications. You will have an eye for detail and stakeholder management skills to provide technical and procedural expertise working within our Digital Services (DS) Directorate.

Job description

A Software Engineer designs, develops, runs, tests and improve software that meets the user’s needs. They are responsible for writing clean, secure code following a test-driven approach. They create a code that is open by default and easy for others to use. A senior developer delivers and integrates complicated or higher risk software to form a complete service.

The ONS Design System has been developed to help teams deliver digital services that are consistent, accessible, and user centred, while reducing duplication of effort and speeding up delivery. Components developed within the Design System are used for all public-facing ONS sites including Census 2031, Survey Data Collection, and the new Website which is launching in 2026.

Responsibilities

The role will include:

• Maintaining the Design System, triaging and prioritising fixes and improvements in collaboration with the Product and Delivery Manager.
• Collaborating with User Research, Interaction Design, and stakeholders to understand the context for improvements to the Design System.
• Support web accessibility and web page performance.
• Contributing to improvements in related products, and in the team's ways of working.
• Technologies used within the team include: CSS, JavaScript, Nunjucks, Node, GitHub, some full stack development (terraform, config), HTML, WCAG and web standards, Craft CMS.

Person specification

Essential Skills Criteria

You will be working as a Front-end Software Engineer on the team. Key skills include:

• Programming and build (Software Engineering) (Practitioner) Collaborates with others when necessary to review specifications. Uses these agreed specifications to design, code, test and document programs or scripts of medium to high complexity, using the right standards and tools. Contributes to code reviews and gives constructive feedback to others.
• Test engineering (Working) Able to design, build, maintain and execute tests that align to user needs and requirements. Able to select appropriate test types and techniques with some support. Follows good engineering practices and standards (including source control and CI/CD pipelines) and integrates tests early to enable continuous feedback. Able to create and maintain automated tests, with some support.
• Service support (Working) Able to help fix service faults following agreed procedures. Able to carry out maintenance tasks on service support infrastructure.
• User focus (Practitioner) Able to collaborate with user researchers and can represent users internally. Understands the difference between user needs and desires of the user. Able to champion user research to focus on all users. Can prioritise and understand the user needs/story, guiding others in doing so. Can offer recommendations on the best tools, methods and solutions to use to meet the user needs.

Behaviours

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

• Working Together
• Managing a Quality Service
• Making Effective Decisions

Technical skills

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

• Programming and Build (Practitioner)
• Test Engineering (Working)
• Service Support (Working)
• Communication between technical and non technical (Working)

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £34,587, Office for National Statistics contributes £10,019 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).

The Office for National Statistics is part of the Civil Service, and as such we share a number of key benefits with other departments, whilst also having our own unique offerings to support our valued colleagues across the organisation.

Whether you are hearing about us for the first time or already know a bit about our organisation, we hope that our careers site will give you a great insight into the benefits and facilities available to our colleagues, and our fantastic working culture.

Inclusion & Accessibility

At ONS we are always looking to attract the very best people from the widest possible talent pool, and we are proud to be an inclusive, equal opportunities employer. As a Disability Confident Leader we’re committed to ensuring that all candidates are treated fairly throughout the recruitment process.

As part of our application process, you will be prompted to provide details of any reasonable adjustments to our recruitment process that you need. If you would like to discuss any reasonable adjustments before applying, please contact the recruitment team in the first instance.

If you would like an accessible version of any of the attachments or recruitment documents below or linked to in this advert, please contact the recruitment team who will be happy to assist.

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

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours, Experience and Technical skills.

Security Clearance

For ONS the requirement for SC clearance is to have been present in the UK for 3 consecutive years immediately prior to applying and the department will consider eligibility by exception on a case-by-case basis. You will be asked to provide information regarding your UK residency during your application, and failure to provide thi