About the role

You’ll be part of an in-house development team in the Digital Publishing division at the Office for National Statistics. You’ll ensure high quality code is delivered to meet user needs. You’ll work with user researchers and UX designers to build robust and accessible user interfaces.

You’ll thrive using agile methods and enjoy working openly, collaboratively and as part of a multidisciplinary team of front-end developers, back-end developers, site reliability engineers, UX designers, user researchers, service manager, product owner and performance analyst.

As a member of the Digital Publishing team, you’ll share responsibility for:

• The ONS website - https://www.ons.gov.uk

• Our developer site - https://developer.ons.gov.uk

• Our performance dashboard - https://performance.ons.gov.uk

• Florence (our CMS) - https://github.com/ONSdigital/florence

Our current front-end technology stack includes HTML5, CSS3, Javascript and ReactJS. You’ll also contribute to some front-end components built with Go.

Main responsibilities

• build accessible interfaces to web services to serve a variety of citizen and government needs, taking responsibility for the quality of code you produce

• build automated tests to support our continuous integration environment

• share knowledge of tools and techniques with your team (both developers and non-developers) and with the wider front-end community

Things you might be working on in a typical day

• investigate, prototype and develop improvements to our website, content management system, developer site and performance dashboard

• contribute to the development of frontend web services

• participate in technical planning, design and code reviews

What we’ll do for you

• provide you with training, mentoring and support from an experienced multidisciplinary team

• give you the freedom to work with modern and relevant technologies including React, ES6, Go and Amazon Web Services with a MacBook Pro development environment

Skills and experience

These are the skills and experiences that might be suitable for this role. An interest in solving the problems we face is much more important than having experience in everything listed.

• experience in front-end development, with detailed knowledge of HTML, CSS and Javascript, including cross-browser and cross-platform support

• experience of building and maintaining complex client-side Javascript applications

• experience of building products which meet the GDS digital service standards

• understanding of software design principles, including progressive enhancement

• experience in building robust and accessible interfaces that work for as many users as possible, regardless of their needs

• ability to quickly research and learn new programming tools and techniques

• a systematic approach to solving problems, and using testing to validate solutions

• understanding of agile environments and version control

• an understanding of front-end web security including standards compliance, OWASP and common attack vectors

• an awareness of technologies used for web applications, e.g. HTTPS, JSON and CDNs, and use of Unix-like operating systems, e.g. Linux and/or Mac OS

Selection process details

Please upload one document that incorporates your CV with your covering letter and complete the four short answer questions.

• Your CV should cover details of education, professional qualifications, employment history, as well as giving details of relevant experience.

• Your covering letter should contain details explaining why this post interests you, your relevant experience and skills, how you meet the criteria as detailed in the vacancy description, giving detailed examples of experience.

• Your four short answer questions should highlight how your skills and experience are relevant to the criteria within the person specification. When completing your answers please only answer the question asked and do not make references to earlier answers. Questions are reviewed on an individual basis and not in succession or order.

Sift

Your application will be sifted against your responses to the short answer questions evidencing the skills and experience detailed in the Job Description.

Interview

If successful at the initial sift stage you will be invited to a competency based interview and as part of the interview you will be expected to deliver a 10 minutes presentation or technical demonstration (please see details in the additional information document via the link https://www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/jobs.cgi?jcode=1605243 our Civil Service Job advert).

Questions at interview will be based around the essential skills and experience and the following competencies:

Civil Service Competencies Level 3

• Delivering at Pace

• Changing and Improving

• Collaborating and Partnering

• Managing a Quality Service

Civil Service Competency Framework - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/civil-service-competency-framework