Junior Developer

Manchester Digital; Manchester, Bristol, London; Hybrid; GBP 42,000 - 53,000; Full time

Job description

£46,725 - £52,467 (London) / £42,893 - £46,776 (National) Based on capability. The base salary of this grade is £46,169 for London and £42,382 for other locations.
Published on 15 April 2025. Deadline 28 April 2025.

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:

• joining up public sector services
• harnessing the power of AI for the public good
• strengthening and extending our digital and data public infrastructure
• elevating leadership and investing in talent
• funding for outcomes and procuring for growth and innovation
• 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.

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.

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

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
• 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
• 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

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 Department operates a discretionary hybrid working policy, which provides for a combination of working hours from your place of work and from your home in the UK. The current expectation for staff is to attend the office or non-home based location for 40-60% of the time over the accounting period.

DSIT does not normally offer full home working (i.e. working at home); but we do offer a variety of flexible working options (including occasionally working from home).

Things you need to know

The standard selection process for roles at GDS consists of:

• A simple application screening process - We only ask for a CV and cover letter of up to 750 words. Important tip - please ensure that your cover letter includes how you meet the skills and experience listed in the “person specification” section above.
• A 60 minute video interview. As part of the interview for this role there will be a technical task.

Depending on how many applications we get, there might also be an extra stage before the video interview, for example a phone interview or a technical exercise.

In order to assist candidates with this role, we will be holding a virtual recruitment event on Thursday 17th April at 2:00pm - 3:00pm to go through the role in more detail. If you are interested in joining this event please e-mail: [e-mail] and a member of the team will send you an invitation to the event.

While we value the use of AI technology to enhance our daily work, we also value the personal touch and urge applicants to write cover letters without the use of AI to emphasise their own unique experiences.

In the event we receive a high volume of applications, we will conduct the initial sift against the lead criteria which is:

• Programming and Build (Software Engineering)

In the Civil Service, we use Success Profiles to evaluate your skills and ability. This gives us the best possible chance of finding the right person for the job, increases performance and improves diversity and inclusivity. We’ll be assessing your technical abilities, skills, experience and behaviours that are relevant to this role.

We’ll also be assessing your experience and specialist technical skills against the following skills defined in the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework for the Junior Developer role:

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

Recruitment Timeline

Sift completion: Friday 9th May

Candidates that do not pass the interview but have demonstrated an acceptable standard may be considered for similar roles at a lower grade.

A reserve list will be held for a period of 12 months, from which further appointments can be made.

Please note that this role requires SC clearance, which would normally need 5 years’ UK residency in the past 5 years. This is not an absolute requirement, but supplementary checks may be needed where individuals have not lived in the UK for that period. This may mean your security clearance (and therefore your appointment) will take longer or, in some cases, not be possible.

For meaningful checks to be carried out, you will need to have lived in the UK for a sufficient period of time, to enable appropriate checks to be carried out and produce a result which provides the required level of assurance. Whilst a lack of UK residency in itself is not necessarily a bar to a security clearance, and expectation of UK residency may range from 3 to 5 years. Failure to meet the residency requirements needed for the role may result in the withdrawal of provisional jobs offers.

Other information

In January 2025, it was announced that the Government Digital Service (GDS) will move to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) as a part of a machinery of government change. This change aims to bring together the digital transformation of public services into one central department, presenting exciting opportunities and positioning DSIT to lead the government’s digital agenda.

This role is in scope to transfer to DSIT when the machinery of government change takes place. As a result, if you are successful and appointed by Cabinet Office to this role before 1st June 2025, your role will transfer from Cabinet Office to DSIT at the time of the relevant machinery of government change taking place. If your start date is after 1 June 2025, you will be appointed direct to DSIT and your appointment will be unaffected by the machinery of government change. We are currently consulting with our Trade Unions on which policies, terms and conditions will apply on transfer. The statement of changes applied to all other Cabinet Office staff will also apply to you if you are successful.

We encourage you to apply and look forward to reviewing your application. We will keep you updated throughout the process.

Sponsorship

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.