Lead Developer

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is the digital centre of government. We are responsible for setting, leading and delivering the vision for a modern digital government.

Our priorities are to drive a modern digital government, by:

1. joining up public sector services
2. harnessing the power of AI for the public good
3. strengthening and extending our digital and data public infrastructure
4. elevating leadership and investing in talent
5. funding for outcomes and procuring for growth and innovation
6. committing to transparency and driving accountability

We are home to the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (I.AI), the world-leading GOV.UK and at the forefront of coordinating the UKs geospatial strategy and activity. We lead the Government Digital and Data function and champion the work of digital teams across government.

Were part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and employ more than 1,000 people all over the UK, with hubs in Manchester, London and Bristol.

The Government Digital Service is where talent translates into impact. From your first day, youll be working with some of the worlds most highly-skilled digital professionals, all contributing their knowledge to make change on a national scale.

Join us for rewarding work that makes a difference across the UK. You'll solve some of the nations highest-priority digital challenges, helping millions of people access services they need.

Data Services for Personalised GOV.UK Channels

This role will be part of a new team at GDS, the focus specifically on developing the services that abstracts personalised data logistics for product teams, enabling them to deliver personalised features without worrying about underlying cross government data complexity.

The work is split into four main areas, data exchange between departments, a serverless platform to power the GOV.UK personalised channels, a platform to store GOV.UK personalised channel data and providing support for a new government digital mailbox. Reporting into an Engineering Manager, youll work within and support the wider engineering teams as well as collaborate with peers including Technical Architects to deliver a user-centric, highly scalable, resilient, and performant platform.

It is expected that this role will involve outreach to other government departments, so an ability to communicate to a wide set of stakeholders, along with the ability to manage many work streams concurrently is a must.

As a GDS Lead Developer, youll share responsibility for the digital transformation of government. You will provide technical leadership within the teams and services you work on, helping to shape and deliver robust, scalable software solutions that meet user needs while aligning with broader GDS standards and goals.

Youll lead by example through hands-on engineering, promoting modern development practices and supporting teams to build resilient, secure and maintainable services. Youll help guide technical decisions, ensuring solutions are practical, well-implemented and aligned with the wider architecture and strategy.

Lead Developers often work across teams and services, collaborating closely with architects, product managers and multidisciplinary teams. Youll support developers in solving complex technical problems, improving engineering practices and maintaining high standards of code quality, reliability and performance. Youll thrive using agile methods and enjoy working collaboratively across departments to deliver meaningful outcomes.

Above all, youll want to make government services better for users, continually improving the way teams build, run and evolve digital services.

As a Lead Developer, youll:

• guide and improve the ways in which the team works, helping establish effective engineering practices, development workflows and collaborative approaches that enable the team to deliver high-quality software
• act as a strong technical contributor within the team, maintaining proficiency across the systems, platforms and tools used to build and operate services
• support the team in understanding how different parts of the system interact, helping troubleshoot complex technical issues and ensuring the team can work confidently across the broader technical landscape
• work with engineers and architects to identify appropriate technologies, patterns and approaches, helping determine when new software should be written and ensuring solutions are pragmatic, maintainable and aligned with organisational standards
• provide day-to-day technical leadership within the team, helping guide technical decisions and ensuring the team maintains a high standard of engineering quality
• coach and mentor developers, supporting their technical growth and helping them develop strong engineering judgement and confidence in their work
• encourage constructive technical discussions and ensure that ideas can be challenged respectfully, helping the team reach well-reasoned decisions
• promote knowledge sharing across the team through collaboration, documentation, code reviews and technical discussions, ensuring that knowledge is not siloed with individuals
• help drive the adoption of good engineering practices such as testing, code quality, observability, security and maintainability
• contribute to the wider engineering and developer community within the organisation, sharing knowledge, participating in communities of practice and supporting cross-team collaboration

Were interested in people who have:

• leadership experience in designing, building and operating scalable cloud-native distributed systems in production environments.
• strong TypeScript and Node.js development skills, using modern tooling, testing frameworks and development practices.
• experience building and operating services in at least one major cloud platform (AWS preferred).
• experience designing event-driven and asynchronous architectures, integrating services through APIs, queues and events.
• strong understanding of cloud architecture, networking, security, observability and operational best practices.
• experience implementing and maintaining infrastructure as code.
• ability to build secure, well-tested and maintainable services, following modern engineering practices including automated testing, CI/CD and observability.
• experience developing and operating large-scale web services, with a strong focus on reliability, resilience and operational excellence.
• ability to provide technical leadership, set technical direction and contribute to long-term technical roadmaps.
• experience working effectively across multiple teams and complex programmes of work.
• experience mentoring and coaching engineers, helping to improve team capability and engineering standards.
• ability to work across a range of product stages, from greenfield development through to live service operation and continuous improvement.
• comfortable contributing to senior technical discussions, evaluating technology choices and balancing trade-offs around security, scalability, cost and maintainability.
• ability to rapidly learn and evaluate new technologies, tools and approaches.
• apply and promote engineering practices such as Test Driven Development (TDD), continuous integration, continuous delivery and DevOps methodologies.

If you meet a few of those criteria but think that you might not meet every last one then dont let that stop you from submitting an application.