These are exciting times at the Department for Education. We're designing, building and iterating more and more user centred services. We work with teachers, students and parents to deliver better outcomes for all our users.
We have brilliant multidisciplinary teams made up of talented user researchers, designers and software developers. We’re shipping and iterating new and improved features all the time. Having excellent software developers is crucial, and we need more of them.
What a developer community means to us
In DfE Digital we're particularly committed to:
- encouraging our developers to grow a strong culture and community, with an emphasis on coaching, mentoring and career development
- supporting the community to own and shape standards, guidance and good practice
We’ve made a great start already by hiring a principal developer for Manchester who supports our junior developers with their learning and development.
Now we’re now looking for a principal developer for London, and a head of software development to lead the profession here in the Department for Education.
Your work will make a difference
From further education to social care we work across a wide range of products and services including:
- those which allow users to find teacher training courses and apply for them
- the 'find a job in teaching' service for people who are already qualified
- an initiative that will give new teachers online course materials to use in classrooms
- tools to help schools to make better buying decisions when converting to an academy
This is an exciting time to join our software development profession.
Our tech stacks
Our primary programming languages are .NET and Ruby.
We use GOV.UK components such as the GDS Design System for styles, patterns and components (as well as building our own).
Regardless of stack, we follow modern principles such as 12 factor apps.
We are cloud-first.
We prefer a loosely coupled architecture using microservices so we can build complex services in a modular way. This allows us to make changes to some parts without affecting others. We can split out those parts between different teams if necessary.
We believe in good RESTful API design for communication between our services and their various parts, and also for exchanging data and functionality with external services.
We host our services in Azure and on the GOV.UK PaaS, using containerisation and infrastructure as code. We version control our infrastructure as well as our application code. This allows our developers to easily create or recreate environments for hosting and testing.
How we work and our tooling
We value and trust our multidisciplinary teams to solve problems.
Our ways of working are agile and lean with continuous delivery and DevOps. Our teams release code and features multiple times a day.
We work in the open and use public repositories. Our developers follow GitHub flow, creating pull requests and reviewing each other’s work.
We believe strongly in pair programming and peer review, and in developers writing good code, testing it and maintaining their test suite. We run tests on every change we make to ensure the highest quality products and features
Our teams collaborate using open Slack channels and they're free to set up integrations with GitHub and other tools to enable ChatOps. They self-organise using a range of tools for planning, delivery and operations. These include Trello, Jira, Google Docs, Teams, Confluence and others.
Join us
Now more than ever, this is a great opportunity to make a difference to the lives of our users and to help us grow and shape a modern software engineering culture.
Please note the 3 jobs advertised below are no longer live. You can find live job vacancies on our 'We’re hiring' page.'
Apply for our Head of software development role.
Apply for our Principal software developer role.
Apply for our Software developer role.
If you have any questions, leave a comment below or feel free to get in touch.
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