Lead Developer

This is a technical leadership role. As a senior member of GovPress, you’ll be bringing technical and non-technical parts of our delivery teams together and making sure our clients have a clear understanding of what we’re building and why.

You will help teams set their strategy for projects, making sure work aligns with technical principles. Additionally, you will support work on our platform and internal tooling, to help ensure that all our work is efficient, secure and well maintained.

Within the GovPress leadership team, we have three threads of work:

• Leading Project Development: being hands on in a project team, usually as the technical lead but sometimes as an experienced practitioner.
• Internal Tooling and DevOps: we have a Lead Developer who sets the strategy for our internal tooling and processes, but all senior members of the team support the delivery of this work.
• Engineering Management: all senior members of the unit manage members of the team, set the GovPress technical strategy, supporting the team as a whole, shaping work and nurturing early career developers.

You will be joining two other Technology Leads who hold overall responsibility for project work and platform tooling. Your role will also have a specific focus, which will be software security.

As a Lead Developer you’ll also usually be a line manager. It might be your first time supporting another person in this way, and you’ll have the support to .

About You

• You want to deliver public digital services that improve the lives of the people who need them.
• You enjoy variety in your work, like the idea of working on a series of different projects in different domains, and are comfortable working through fuzzy problems and with multi-disciplinary teams.
• You communicate complex technical problems well to non-technical colleagues, junior developers and apprentices. You will be used to talking to clients and end-users about their requirements.
• You have demonstrated aspects of leadership in the past, perhaps as a line manager or a technical lead and you are used to nurturing early career developers.
• You work in a supportive way, helping others solve problems through curiosity, but also offer your experience when appropriate.
• You have worked in web publishing, and on WordPress (with Gutenburg) specifically, on at least one public facing project. You may or may not work regularly with WordPress, and you don’t need to be familiar with any specific toolchains, but you will be familiar with both modern front-end and back-end development.
• You will have a working knowledge of how to apply secure design principles to day to day development work. You don’t need to be specifically familiar with the government’s , but you should be familiar with the principles that underpin it.
• You have a solid understanding of how to write production software, a working knowledge of Git or similar version control software, CI/CD and DevOps practices and know or are willing to learn some of the technologies we use as you come across them on the job. You write unit and integration tests as a normal part of your software development work and document and share the things you learn with others.