Lead Software Developer

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and delivery of scalable full-stack solutions.
• Provide technical direction, coaching, and mentoring to engineers within the team.
• Promote engineering best practices, coding standards, and knowledge sharing.
• Drive technical decision-making and support technology selection across the delivery lifecycle.
• Champion modern software engineering approaches, including DevOps, automated testing, and continuous delivery.
• Plan and lead the implementation of complex features and related user stories.
• Work collaboratively with architects, product managers, business analysts, testers, and client stakeholders to define and deliver solutions.
• Take ownership of technical delivery and ensure alignment with business and user needs.
• Contribute to sprint planning, estimation, backlog refinement, and technical design discussions.
• Participate in release planning, deployment activities, and production support.
• Take responsibility for the production services developed by the team.
• Improve system robustness, resilience, observability, performance, and operational stability.
• Conduct code reviews and provide quality assurance for work in progress.
• Troubleshoot complex technical issues and drive root cause analysis.
• Identify opportunities for automation and continuous improvement across the service.
• Build strong working relationships with stakeholders and delivery partners.
• Participate in show-and-tell sessions, demonstrations, and technical workshops.
• Contribute to the wider engineering and developer communities.
• Communicate technical concepts effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Requirements

Software Engineering

• Extensive experience developing cloud-native applications using TypeScript and Node.js.
• Strong understanding of full-stack software development principles and modern engineering practices.
• Experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs and event-driven architectures.
• Strong knowledge of object-oriented and functional programming concepts.
• Experience with CI/CD tools, containerization technologies, frontend frameworks such as React, and advanced Java frameworks including Spring and Hibernate.

Cloud & Infrastructure

• Proven experience working with AWS services including Lambda, SQS, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, CloudWatch.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform.
• Strong understanding of cloud security, scalability, reliability, and operational excellence.

Data & Integration

• Experience working with PostgreSQL and relational database design.
• Knowledge of data modelling, performance optimisation, and database management.
• Experience integrating services across complex enterprise environments.

Collaboration & Delivery

• Experience working in Agile, multidisciplinary delivery teams.
• Strong client-facing communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Experience using collaboration and delivery tools such as Jira, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Figma.

Desirable Skills

• Experience with Scala and/or Java development.
• Experience delivering services within the UK Public Sector or Government Digital Service (GDS) environments.
• Familiarity with Government Technology Code of Practice and Service Standards.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automated testing frameworks.
• Knowledge of monitoring, observability, and operational support practices in production environments.
• Experience leading distributed or multi-supplier teams.