Senior Full Stack Software Engineer

The GRIP platform has a large user base, serving thousands of users across 250 public sector organisations. It is a full stack web application that helps government to manage and track its priorities and initiatives, and capture reporting on them, across all government departments, and for consumption by the most senior decision makers. The application has support and visibility at the very highest levels of the organisation. We also help to develop and maintain the governments Evaluation Registry, which tracks planned and completed evaluations of governments policies.

We are looking for a full-stack developer to join our small software engineering team, building and managing this critical part of Governments tooling. You will have the opportunity to have genuine impact on how Government manages its work and to contribute to its overall effectiveness.

We are at an exciting stage, as we becoming a critical part of how government manages its most important areas of work. This will mean working on how the application scales, building new features, and maintaining a reliable, high-quality service.

Main Responsibilities:

You will work on both the front and back end of the application, mainly in JavaScript, working with a range of AWS services. Our core stack includes React, Node.js, and Postgres, so you will need to be comfortable working with these. Other parts of our work are in Python, and experience of Python web frameworks, e.g. Django, would also be helpful. Each engineer is involved across the full range of responsibilities. Your work will therefore include managing our infrastructure and responding to any performance issues, building server functionality and new microservices, database management and schema changes, prototyping and building new front-end features, and testing and deployment. There will also be opportunities to engage directly with users in a range of roles across government, and to help shape the overall direction of the product.

You can expect to have responsibility to:

• Build accessible and interactive interfaces, server functionality, and microservices, taking responsibility for the quality of your code.
• Decide and evolve how we structure and manage our data.
• Be a confident communicator, able to bridge the gap between the technical and non-technical team members to build the right product.

Essential experience

• Experience of front-end development, with detailed knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
• Experience of technologies used for web applications, e.g. HTTPS, JSON and CDNs, and of Unix-like operating systems, e.g. Linux and/or Mac OS.
• Experience of back-end data infrastructure, including SQL databases.
• Understanding of software design principles, including progressive enhancement.
• Experience in building robust and accessible interfaces that work for multiple users.
• An understanding of front-end web performance.
• Ability to quickly research and learn new programming tools and techniques.
• Experience of writing robust code using approaches such as TDD/BDD, unit testing, integration testing and feature testing
• Understanding of agile principles and working practices
• Experience of code reviewing workflows and version control.
• Experience of user-centred design principles and delivering to user needs.

Desirable experience

• Deeper experience in any of our technology choices, or in web application security

Additional information:

A minimum 60% of your working time should be spent at your principal workplace. Although requirements to attend other locations for official business will also count towards this level of attendance.