Government Digital Service

Contents

• Location
• About the job
• Benefits
• Things you need to know
• Apply and further information

Bristol, London, Manchester

About the job

Job summary

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

The Domains Team protects public sector domain name spaces such as “.gov.uk”, and ensures that they remain stable, trusted, well managed and resistant to compromise. The team also helps protect the infrastructure tools and services associated with these domains.

Job description

As a Domains Team Senior Developer you’ll be responsible for working alongside mid-level and junior developers to build and maintain services for identifying and managing vulnerabilities associated with public sector domains. You will be expected to take the lead on individual epics as well as contributing across all of the team’s priorities.

The platform has a Django application at its core, supported by AWS serverless components and automated tasks using Celery. These components feed data into a Salesforce-based frontend. We have several ancillary services supporting the team’s wider objectives and plan to stand up additional components/services over the next year.

Our services are built almost exclusively using Python, including our infrastructure (using the AWS CDK), with small amounts of HTML/CSS and Javascript used in our frontend and for automated testing. 

You will build and maintain a domain vulnerability management toolset, principally in Python, including:

• Adding new, commercially-available or open source data sources to our existing ingestion pipeline
• Designing, building and maintaining additional tools for monitoring for and detecting vulnerabilities with public sector services.
• Extending our existing Django/Postgres-based API to accommodate new classes of vulnerability and enable reporting of these to operational colleagues and external partners.
• Building and extending tools to export vulnerability data to public sector domain owners, as supported by their vulnerability management tooling (MS Sentinel, Splunk etc).
• Maintaining and improving web applications used by our partners for consuming services provided by the Domains Team
• Integrating newly-built and extended components with our existing, AWS-based infrastructure using the Python CDK.
• Extending our existing reporting tooling (based on AWS Quicksight), and build new tools as required, to provide stakeholders with an overall picture of the range and scale of vulnerabilities discovered by our service.
• Clearly communicating ideas with the rest of the development team, service owners, and other colleagues; receive feedback and build consensus for proposed solutions.
• Sharing responsibility for establishing development standards and good practice, and ensuring that the development team works to them.
• Ensuring the product is built according to the needs of users, including an operations team, a communications team, national security stakeholders and other apex domain holders.

The above list of job duties is not exhaustive and a willingness to work flexibly as priorities change is an essential requirement of the role.

Person specification

This role aligns to the following in the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework - Senior Developer (technical)

• Development process optimisation
• Information security
• Programming and build (software engineering)
• Prototyping
• Service support
• Systems design
• Systems integration
• User focus

Specialist skills required

You will also have the following skills:

• A high level of expertise in Python and Python web frameworks, ideally Django.
• Strong working knowledge of modern development tools, including Docker, git and GitHub
• A good working knowledge of Amazon Web Services, in particular deploying containerised applications
• An ability to build and maintain CI/CD tooling, ideally using GitHub Actions and AWS CodeBuild/CodePipeline
• A strong understanding of relational databases, ideally PostgreSQL
• The ability to investigate problems with running applications, including interrogating AWS logs, responding to errors raised in Sentry (or similar tools) and applying fixes
• Experience of deploying applications and infrastructure using either the Python CDK or other infrastructure as code products
• A good working knowledge of Linux/UNIX, including system administration and shell scripting
• An understanding of what DNS is and its role in enabling the operation of the Internet
• Leading work within an Agile environment, including leading and supporting more junior developers

Benefits

The benefits of working at GDS

There are many benefits of working at GDS, including:

• flexible hybrid working with flexi-time and the option to work part-time or condensed hours
• a Civil Service Pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%
• 25 days of annual leave, increasing by a day each year up to a maximum of 30 days
• an extra day off for The King’s birthday
• an in-year bonus scheme to recognise high performance
• career progression and coaching, including a training budget for personal development
• paid volunteering leave
• a focus on wellbeing with access to an employee assistance programme
• job satisfaction from making government services easier to use and more inclusive for people across the UK
• advances on pay, including for travel season tickets
• death in service benefits
• cycle to work scheme and facilities
• access to children's holiday play schemes across different locations in central London
• access to an employee discounts scheme
• 10 learning days per year
• volunteering opportunities (5 special leave days per year)
• access to a suite of learning activities through Civil Service learning

GDS offers hybrid working for all employees. This means that everyone does some working from home and also spends some time in their local office. You’ll agree to your hybrid working arrangement with your line manager in line with your preferences and business needs.

Any move to Government Digital Service from another employer will mean you can no longer access childcare vouchers. This includes moves between government departments. You may however be eligible for other government schemes, including Tax Free Childcare. Determine your eligibility at https://www.childcarechoices.gov.uk

The Civil Service welcomes applications from people who have recently left prison or have an unspent conviction. Read more about prison leaver recruitment (opens in new window).

Once this job has closed, the job advert will no longer be available. You may want to save a copy for your records.

Contact point for applicants

Job contact :

• Name : gds-recruitment@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk
• Email : gds-recruitment@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk

Recruitment team

• Email : gds-recruitment@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk

Further information

If you feel your application has not been treated in accordance with the Recruitment Principles and you wish to make a complaint, you should contact gds-recruitment-complaints@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk in the first instance.

If you are not satisfied with the response you receive you can contact the Civil Service Commission by email: info@csc.gov.uk Or in writing: Civil Service Commission, Room G/8 1 Horse Guards Road, London, SW1A 2HQ.