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Short summary

We are looking for an experienced developer to work as a member of the Digital Land team in the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG). We are a team of digital specialists, and policy people working with urban planners, and local government to make more land and housing data available to fix the broken housing market.

Job description

You’ll be developing data visualisations, pipelines, and prototyping other tools to help people publish data across local government. You’ll thrive using agile methods and enjoy working openly, collaboratively and as part of a truly multidisciplinary team focused on a number of different projects related to planning, land and housing data.

Responsibilities

• Building digital services to serve a variety of citizen and government needs, taking responsibility for the quality of code you produce

• Implementing services and APIs for purposes such as collecting, processing and presenting data to our users, building prototypes and integrating with services and software used by local government

• Sharing knowledge of tools and techniques with your wider team, both developers and non-developers

• Acting as a digital ambassador, supporting recruitment, identifying good practices for others to adopt and sharing experiences through blog posts, talks at conferences etc.

• Participating in workshops, retrospectives, design crits, user research testing and feedback workshops, and other collaborative work usual in a digital team

• Providing technical leadership within the team advising and working with developers to identify the best solutions

• Taking responsibility for solving often complex, technical and design issues

Key Criteria

Successful candidates should be able to demonstrate the following skills & experience

• Good software development skills, specialising either in front-end development, or backend development with an emphasis on processing data

• An understanding of how to build accessible, progressively enhanced services on the Web

• Knowledge of how to build automated tests to support our continuous deployment environment

• Experience of HTML, CSS and JavaScript to develop front end prototypes experience of backend development, ideally using a variety of different programming languages such as Python, Javascript and Go.

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

• Helping colleagues with their career development and coaching more junior staff members

• Some experience of line management would be beneficial

• Some experience of working with geospatial data would be beneficial

Selection process details

MHCLG want to bring in and bring on a diverse workforce at all levels.

The application system is designed to remove as much bias as possible from the recruitment system – this means that a hiring manager does not know your name, your details, see your whole application in one go (or have your CV at review stage unless stated otherwise).

Your answers are randomised and chunked up. This means that each assessor views sets of responses to questions for example all candidates’ responses to ‘Seeing the Big Picture’ rather than seeing a candidate’s full application. The science behind this is that recruitment can be subject to ordering and fatigue effects and we want to reduce this as much as possible.

Most of our campaigns utilise multiple assessors and so it is possible that each of your answers would be viewed by different assessors.

When writing your application, remember

• The assessor won’t be reading your answers sequentially.

• Do not assume that the same assessors will have read all of your answers.

• If talking about something in your first answer, make sure that you write the second answer as if you had not written the first (and so on!)

At sift, we will be assessing

Technical (Lead Question): Can you tell us about some of the tools and techniques you have used to clean, process and visualise data?

Behaviour: Working Together - Can you tell us a little about your experience working as part of a team, and how you contributed to its success?

Behaviour: Developing Self and Others - Can you tell us some of the ways you discover new technologies, approaches, and techniques, and how you then communicate what you have learnt to other people?

Behaviour: Managing a Quality Service - Can you describe some of the techniques you use to ensure the software you develop functions in the way you intend?

Experience: What experience do you have of developing or supporting software in a beta or live environment?

There is a 250 word limit per question.

In the event that we receive a large number of applications, we may conduct an initial sift based on the lead behaviour.

The interview will be of a blended nature consisting of behaviour, experience, ability, technical and strength based questions as listed in the advert. The strength based questions will require natural responses from the candidates.

Please note we do not consider CV applications – you must apply for this role through Civil Service Jobs

Benefits

Transfers across the Civil Service on or after 4 October 2018

Staff transferring from other government departments to a new PAYE scheme on any type of move other than TUPE/COSOP will lose their access to salary sacrifice for childcare. However, MHCLG do have childcare voucher scheme for under-5s and have a staff benefits scheme offering cycle to work and discounted shopping vouchers.
For further information about the benefits available to MHCLG employees, please see the attached Candidate Pack.

Sift and Interview Dates

Sifting is envisaged to take place from 6th July 2020 with interviews provisionally scheduled for 13th July 2020.

Contact details

Paul Downey

paul.downey@communities.gov.uk