Junior Developer

This role is available across our London, Bristol and Manchester offices

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

Our priorities are to drive a modern digital government, by:

1. joining up public sector services
2. harnessing the power of AI for the public good
3. strengthening and extending our digital and data public infrastructure
4. elevating leadership and investing in talent
5. funding for outcomes and procuring for growth and innovation
6. committing to transparency and driving accountability

We are home to the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (I.AI), the world-leading GOV.UK and at the forefront of coordinating the UK’s geospatial strategy and activity. We lead the Government Digital and Data function and champion the work of digital teams across government.

We’re part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and employ more than 1,000 people all over the UK, with hubs in Manchester, London and Bristol.

The Government Digital Service is where talent translates into impact. From your first day, you’ll be working with some of the world’s most highly-skilled digital professionals, all contributing their knowledge to make change on a national scale.

Join us for rewarding work that makes a difference across the UK. You'll solve some of the nation’s highest-priority digital challenges, helping millions of people access services they need.

The GDS 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 Junior Developer you’ll be responsible for working alongside developers and senior developers to build and maintain services for identifying and managing vulnerabilities associated with public sector domains.

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 are in the process of standing up additional components and services.

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.

With the support of more senior developers, you will build and maintain a domain vulnerability management toolset including:

• Adding new, commercially-available or open source data sources to our existing ingestion pipeline
• Designing, building and maintaining additional tools for monitoring 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.
• Clearly communicating ideas with, and responding to feedback from, the rest of the development team, service owners, and other colleagues;
• Adhering to development standards and good practice, including recommending improvements.
• 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

We're interested in people who have:

• A working knowledge of Python
• Some experience with web frameworks, ideally Django
• Experience of writing tests to validate code
• Some knowledge or experience of working with databases
• An ability to work on the command line, either under MacOS or Linux
• The ability to work in an Agile environment
• A basic understanding about web security and accessibility
• Understanding of software design principles

DSIT cannot offer Visa sponsorship to candidates through this campaign. DSIT holds a Visa sponsorship licence but this can only be used for certain roles and this campaign does not qualify.

Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is Security Check (SC)