Lead Software Engineer (EXT) - Office for National Statistics - G7

The ONS operates a flexible hybrid working model across the UK, with colleagues linked to one of our contractual locations working between office and remote throughout the week. The locations for this role are Newport and Titchfield (Fareham)

All colleagues are required to work from their contractually allocated site for at least 40% of their working time.

The induction process for the role will be conducted in person.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is looking for a Lead Software Engineer working in the cloud (GCP) to join our active community of technical professionals, within our Digital Service (DS) directorate.

Digital Services (DS) delivers critical digital and technology capabilities for the whole organisation. Our purpose is to enable innovation at speed and scale to keep the ONS at the forefront of providing high quality data and analysis to inform the UK, improve lives and build the future. As a trusted partner, we work collaboratively to identify leading-edge technologies and ways of working to deliver technical and digital solutions that meet the needs of the ONS and wider government.

You will be providing technical expertise and leadership for the Index Matching Service (IMS). IMS comprises of four matching services, Address, Classification, Business and Demographic and these services are at different stages of development.

Working within the Digital Services Division you will thrive using agile methods and enjoy working openly and collaboratively with multi-disciplinary teams.

This campaign is for external candidates who wish to be based at either our Newport or Titchfield site. Therefore, this campaign has been linked with the internal advert 456408 Lead Software Engineer. If you are an internal candidate to ONS please apply via the other campaign. The selection and interview process will be combined, so you do not need to apply to both campaigns.

This a key engineering role in a multidisciplinary agile delivery team who are supporting, building and enhancing the Index Matching Services on the Google cloud platform.

You will play a pivotal role in the design and implementation of secure, innovative cloud solutions and work alongside a delivery manager, technical lead, software engineer, devsecops engineer and Business Analyst. You will set and use modern engineering standards and support the growth of emerging software engineers when needed. You will also provide advice, guidance and technical leadership as well as supporting your team in delivery implementation and problem solving.

The Address Index Matching Service (AIMS) is an established service and is extensively used for the matching of addresses. Your initial focus will be supporting and enhancing AIMS including for the upcoming 2027 Census test where AIMS is critical for contact with respondents and backend processes. The other three services are in development using different technologies and AIMS itself will be re developed with similar technology after the Census 2027 test.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership, coaching, and mentoring the team, promoting knowledge sharing and adoption of good practice
• Proficient in a wide range of technical systems and involved in identifying appropriate security, technology and approaches, deciding when software should be written
• Design and building secure software to serve a variety of user needs and enhance existing software products to meet evolving user needs whilst coaching and developing junior engineers
• Sharing knowledge of tools and techniques; identifying and sharing good practices and collaborating to ensure knowledge sharing across the team and wider community
• Lead on identifying and implementing opportunities to optimise processes, and coaches team to deliver service improvements and enhanced capability
• Embedding Digital Applications and Software Engineering agreed key principles.
• Can break down complex technical tasks into sub-tasks and collaborates with the team and Delivery Managers to create an environment where the team can work effectively
• Contributes to the community
• Communicates with stakeholders on behalf of technical teams

Essential Criteria:

• Programming and Build ( Expert) - Advises on the right way to apply standards and methods, ensuring compliance. Maintains technical responsibility for all the stages and iterations of a software development project. Provides technical advice to stakeholders and sets the team-based standards for programming tools and techniques. Leads code reviewing sessions and gives constructive feedback to others.
• Test Engineering (Practitioner) - Able to design, implement and execute a wide range of functional and non-functional testing techniques and to standardise their application across team. Able to make decisions on running types of, and environments for testing. Able to raise defects with the business and help prioritise them based on defect severity. Develops, extends and maintains reusable test frameworks and tooling; maintains and adapts CI/CD pipelines to ensure effective test integration and quality gates. Guides and coaches others to create and maintain comprehensive standards and create and maintain automated tests compliant with these standards, while researching future tools, methodologies and techniques.
• Service support (Expert) - Identifies, locates, and competently fixes faults. Able to investigate undocumented issues and develop fixes. Can triage issues and build stories for more involved issues, document processes and support colleagues. Demonstrates a breadth of understanding of service support and advise others on different methodologies and types of service support.
• Communicating between technical and non-technical (Expert) - Able to mediate and mend relationships, communicating with stakeholders at all levels, adopting the appropriate communication method. Able to manage stakeholder expectations and moderately difficult discussions about high risk and complex topics, even within constrained timescales. Able to speak on behalf of and represent the community to large audiences inside and/or outside of the organisation. Can break down complex technical tasks into sub-tasks and collaborates with the team and Delivery Managers to create an environment where the team can work effectively.

Technical skills criteria

The Index Matching Services are fully cloud-based services, built on Google Cloud Platform with the following technologies.

• Java
• Python/Flask
• ElasticSearch
• Scala
• GCP(Cloud functions, GKE, Serverless dataproc, Cloud SQL, Cloud Run etc)
• Terraform to specify all Infrastructure As Code
• CI/CD Pipelines(Github Actions/Cloud Build)

We expect that you will have experience of using these technologies, accepting that experience of some might be more limited but you must be keen to learn all the technical stack above. Please ensure that your CV fully reflects those that you have used before. Your desire to learn and develop in a collaborative software environment will also be what we are looking for.