Senior Software Engineer (Full Stack)

Job summary

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 experienced Software Engineers 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.

About Digital Services Our digital teams develop, deliver and support a broad range of products and services that are central to the work of the Office for National Statistics (ONS). These services span the statistical lifecycle, supporting how data is collected, processed, managed and made available to users.We work closely with business areas, users and technical teams to develop new capabilities, enhance existing services and ensure established products continue to meet changing needs. Our teams use a broad range of technologies and collaborate with colleagues and external suppliers to deliver secure, reliable and user-focused digital services.

Job description

About the opportunitiesWe are recruiting for two roles across two areas of digital delivery. Although each role will have a different focus, both provide the opportunity to work within multidisciplinary teams, collaborate across ONS and contribute to the delivery and continuous improvement of important digital services. The technologies listed are examples rather than a definitive list, and we welcome applications from candidates with experience using other relevant or comparable technologies.Role 1: Digital Applications – Survey Data Collection (SDC) This role will sit within Digital Applications, working in our Survey Data Collection (SDC) area. SDC provides digital products and services that support the collection of survey data across ONS, from designing and completing online questionnaires to setting up surveys, managing respondent interactions and moving survey data and metadata between systems. The role will primarily focus on Respondent Account Services (RASRM), a key part of the Survey Data Collection (SDC) landscape. RASRM provides services that support how respondents interact with ONS surveys, including respondent accounts, secure messaging and survey management capabilities. Alongside your core focus on respondent services, you will work collaboratively across the wider Survey Data Collection area, contributing to the services that support the end-to-end delivery and collection of ONS surveys. You will work as part of a multidisciplinary team to develop and improve these services, balancing the delivery of new capability with the security, resilience and maintenance of live services. The work may include improving experiences for respondents and ONS users, modernising technology and helping reduce reliance on legacy systems. Technology:Java / Spring Boot • Python / Flask • Go • GCP • GKE / Kubernetes • Docker • Helm • Terraform • Cloud SQL • Pub/Sub • GitHub Actions / Concourse • Cloud Build / Cloud DeployRole 2: Dissemination Dissemination provides and supports the digital services used to publish official statistics through the ONS website and application programming interfaces (APIs). The area runs live publishing services while transforming the technology that supports the ONS website, including a new content management system, dataset services, shared applications, and cloud-based infrastructure. This work is central to making ONS statistics available, accessible, and reliable for the public, government, researchers, and other users. The role is in a team which develops, supports and improves services used across the current and new ONS website platforms. Its responsibilities include search, authentication, routing, and feedback services, alongside components that support content migration and the transition from legacy technology. You will work closely with other software engineering teams, product and delivery colleagues, publishing and technical specialists. The team supports live services and contributes to the wider transformation of the ONS website, so engineers work across new development, integration, operational support, and the improvement of existing services. Technology:Java • Go • Python • MongoDB • API-based and microservice architectures • CI/CD pipelines • Apache Kafka • AWS • HTML/Jinja templating

Responsibilities:

The roles will include:

• Develop and enhance software solutions to meet user story needs.
• Follow best practice guidelines and help to improve those guidelines.
• Write clean, secure, and well-tested code.
• Coach and mentor colleagues.
• Support a continuous delivery environment, using effective delivery and deployment techniques
• Operate the services they build and identify issues in production.
• Design and execute a range of test techniques.

Person specification

Essential Skills Criteria

• 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.
• Systems Design (Practitioner) - Designs systems characterised by medium levels of risk, impact and business or technical complexity. Selects appropriate design standards, methods and tools and ensures they are applied effectively. Reviews the systems designs of others to ensure selection of appropriate technology, efficient use of resources and integration of multiple systems and technology.
• Test Engineering (Practitioner) – Able to design, implement and execute functional and non-functional tests using a wide range of techniques and frameworks. Able to make decisions on running types of test cases, and environments for testing. Able to work with the team to develop and iterate on testing standards. Maintains and adapts CI/CD pipelines to ensure effective test integration and quality gates. Able to guide and coach others in creating and maintaining comprehensive and reliable tests that meet standards. Able to research and prepare for future testing needs, including tools, methodologies and techniques.
• Modern Developments Standards (Practitioner) – Able to apply modern development standards and support others in applying them. Contributes to continuous improvement of approaches.
• Service Support (Practitioner) - Identifies, locates and fixes service faults in production and non-production environments. Investigates and resolves complex or undocumented issues, using a variety of methods, tools and system knowledge. (Such as logs, test results etc). Triage incidents, assesses impact and priority, and create stories or tasks for fixes. Contributes to team support practices by documenting resolutions, improving processes and supporting colleagues in diagnosing issues.

You may have deeper expertise in some areas than others, but you must demonstrate a willingness to learn and develop across the full technical stack. Experience working collaboratively in agile teams and delivering reliable, production-grade services is essential.

We expect that you will have expe