Lead Software Developer (up to 97,887)

These are exciting times at the Department for Education. In 2026, we will continue to build services for all our users spanning all citizens in England.

As a lead software developer, you will be part of a team responsible for developing and supporting scalable, secure, and high-quality user-centric digital services. Working with senior colleagues, you will lead team members on the design and build of digital services and will work closely with colleagues within multidisciplinary agile teams, that focus on delivering work iteratively and at pace. You will innovate to radically transform how public services are delivered and improved.

The DfE is looking for a lead software developer who will add rigour and value to an organisation where software development across Data and Digital product delivery is still evolving. This is an exciting opportunity to help build and maintain a software development capability in a fast-paced environment within the Department.

You will be an experienced software development leader and practitioner, setting technical direction across the project, wider department and creating the conditions for teams to build maintainable, sustainable and user-centred digital products. You will work across organisational boundaries to improve engineering standards, enable effective delivery and develop the capability of the software development community.

As a Lead Software Developer you will:

• Be responsible for a team of developers, including line management
• Help lead the development community to ensure we build maintainable and sustainable digital products
• Stay up to date with, and support the creation/maintenance of, standards around development practices and techniques to best enable our teams to consistently deliver at pace
• Handle allocation of developers to teams, ensuring a good balance of personalities, skills and seniority, enabling the teams to deliver great services quickly
• Mentor development teams, helping ensure they're building things to our standards, and identifying opportunities for collaboration and career progression
• Advocate user-centric, agile approaches which focus on rapid, effective delivery of high-quality digital services
• Transform government into a modern, agile development centre by embedding practices like Test Driven Development, continuous deployment, and DevSecOps
• Support sharing of methods and technologies across teams, government, and the industry by helping to organise internal and external events
• Help publicise our achievements and learning through blog posts and social media
• Provide leadership for the support and operation of digital services, including the triage and resolution of significant software issues. Participate in an out-of-hours support rota where required, for which an allowance will be paid.

Essential Criteria

Candidates must be able to demonstrate these essential experienced based skills:

• Expert practical experience of software development using C# .NET, together with strong knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and the ability to set technical direction and evaluate appropriate technologies across a varied software estate.
• Expert experience of creating, sustaining and assuring modern software development standards, practices and techniques across multiple teams, enabling consistent delivery of secure, accessible, maintainable and high-quality digital services.
• Significant experience of setting technical direction and potentially leading multiple technical teams to deliver user-focused services in an agile environment, including developing people, influencing senior stakeholders and resolving complex delivery and engineering challenges.
• Expert experience of establishing, embedding and assuring modern software development practices, including test-driven development, automated testing, CI/CD, DevSecOps and modern GitHub-based development workflows, with evidence of improving deployment quality, frequency and reliability.
• Expert experience of designing and assuring scalable, resilient cloud architectures using appropriate IaaS and PaaS services, with strong knowledge of infrastructure as code, containerisation, operability and cost-effective service design.
• Expert experience of applying and assuring software design principles, including object-oriented design, SOLID principles and design patterns, and of designing scalable, maintainable and loosely coupled architectures using RESTful APIs and microservices where appropriate.
• Expert understanding of web application security, including the OWASP Top 10, with significant experience of embedding secure development practices and assuring that security risks are identified, managed and addressed throughout the software delivery lifecycle.
• Significant experience of building software development capability through knowledge sharing, coaching and mentoring, leading a diverse and inclusive development community across multidisciplinary teams, and enabling the adoption of shared methods and technologies that improve the sustainability of digital products.