https://hodigital.blog.gov.uk/hod-careers-sheffield/
Jobs at the Sheffield Development Hub
Home Office Digital is changing the way the Home Office works, building new digital services that help keep the UK's streets safe and its borders secure.
We work in small Agile delivery teams, putting the user at the heart of everything we do. We’re now recruiting for a number of roles for our new Sheffield Development Hub, to help shape the culture and direction of the department.
We’re looking for talented, enthusiastic and collaborative people who are passionate about transforming digital public services. If that sounds like you, send your CV, clearly stating which role you are applying for, to hodigitalsheffield@digital.homeoffice.gov.uk to be invited to a recruitment day where you can find out more about our current opportunities. The closing date for applications is 31 December 2015.
Current vacancies
We’re currently looking for:
- Business Analysts x 3 and Senior Business Analysts x 2
- Content Designer and Senior Content Designer
- Delivery Managers x 5 and Senior Delivery Manager
- Designer and Senior Designer
- Developers x 8 and Senior Developers x 9
- Dev Ops and Senior Dev Ops x 3
- Head of Development Profession
- Home Team Admin and Head of Home Team Admin
- Senior Product Manager
- Test Automation Engineers x 4
- User Researchers x 2 and Senior User Researcher
About Home Office Digital
At Home Office Digital we do things differently. We've introduced an Agile culture to the department, building digital services to help it make better decisions faster in borders, immigration, citizenship, policing and security.
We research, design and build our services in-house, using small, multi-disciplinary teams. With the support of the Government Digital Service, this is an entirely new direction for government and a fantastic opportunity to positively influence how we do things at the Home Office.
We're continually innovating and iterating to make our business processes smarter. And we’re now investing in the specialist skills we need to build our digital capability even further.
Our new Sheffield development centre will be a centre of excellence, using the best tools and techniques available to research, build and support user-centred services. It’s a fantastic opportunity to join a new team with a start-up feel, with benefits including:
- a Civil Service Pension
- 25 days annual leave (rising to 30 after 10 years), 8 days public holidays and 1 privilege day per year
- flexible working
- childcare vouchers
- eyecare scheme
- shared parental leave and adoption leave
- study leave
- designated paid leave for public service
- cycle to work scheme
Read more about working at Home Office Digital.
Who we’re looking for
The people we’re looking for:
- don't have a hierarchical mindset but enjoy being part of a flat structure
- want to build great digital services, for the public and civil servants
- thrive on autonomy and have a focus on outcomes
- believe collaboration brings about the best results
- want to learn from their team and share their own expertise
- help develop the whole organisation by taking part in co-curricular activities like 'lunch and learns'
- aren't afraid to give - or get - constructive feedback
Business Analysts
Salary
£27,482 to £32,703
Civil Service grade: Higher Executive Officer
Successful candidates with exceptional skills and experience may be paid at the top end of the salary scale and may also receive a recruitment and retention allowance up to a maximum of up to £1,500.
About the role
Home Office Digital is building a development team in Sheffield, and wants business analysts who are looking to challenge themselves and build their skills.
You'll join a team where you'll be working with other skilled and motivated people, with a culture that promotes openness, participation and ownership.
You'll need to maintain a keen awareness of technology as well as Home Office policy and processes. You'll work closely with the business and will play a key role in communicating key principles such as user centred design, Agile delivery and quality management.
You'll be someone who:
- enjoys working with end customers to understand, capture and refine their requirements
- has experience of serving as a business proxy
- has supported delivery teams in relation to the definition of solutions, design patterns and non-functional requirements
Responsibilities
Day to day you'll:
- understand business users' requirements and translate them into user stories with acceptance criteria
- work with the delivery teams to generate initial impact assessments
- track and refine user stories and acceptance criteria
- generate and prioritise Scrum backlogs
- review customer acceptance criteria
Specific focus areas for this role are:
- generation of user stories
- splitting down epic user stories into release and sprint level for the development team
- understanding the end to end user journey across channels
- impacting requirements against creative designs
- support of estimation and release planning
Skills and experience
You'll need key skills including:
- interviewing
- requirements elicitation and user story generation
- knowledge capture
- written communications
- liaising with business stakeholders
- analysis
- business process design
- business rules design
- usability
- organising focus groups for end users
Senior Business Analyst
Salary
£47,022 to £55,957
Civil Service grade: Grade 7
Successful candidates with exceptional skills and experience may be paid at the top end of the salary scale and may also receive a recruitment and retention allowance up to a maximum of up to £2,250.
About the role
Home Office Digital is building a development team in Sheffield, and wants business analysts who are looking to challenge themselves and build their skills.
You'll join a team where you'll be working with other skilled and motivated people, with a culture that promotes openness, participation and ownership.
You'll need to maintain a keen awareness of technology as well as Home Office policy and processes. You'll work closely with the business and will play a key role in communicating key principles such as user centred design, Agile delivery and quality management.
You'll be someone who:
- enjoys working with end customers to understand, capture and refine their requirements
- has experience of serving as a business proxy
- has supported delivery teams in relation to the definition of solutions, design patterns and non-functional requirements
Responsibilities
Day to day you'll:
- understand business users' requirements and translate them into user stories with acceptance criteria
- work with the delivery teams to generate initial impact assessments
- track and refine user stories and acceptance criteria
- identify coherent sets of end-to-end functionality
- generate and prioritise Scrum backlogs
- ensure cross-team requirements are compatible
- review customer acceptance criteria
- impact requirements on customer experience strategy
- support the resolution of design issues
- coach and mentor other BAs
Specific focus areas for this role are:
- generation of user stories
- splitting down epic user stories into release and sprint level for the development team
- understanding the end to end user journey across channels
- impacting requirements against creative designs
- supporting the design solution
- support of estimation and release planning
Skills and experience
You'll need key skills including:
- interviewing
- requirements elicitation and user story generation
- knowledge capture
- written communications
- liaising with business stakeholders
- analysis
- business process design
- business rules design
- data and process modelling
- UI and interaction design
- information architecture
- usability
- organising focus groups for end users
Content Designer
Salary
£34,588 to £39,742
Civil Service grade: Senior Executive Officer
Successful candidates with exceptional skills and experience may be paid at the top end of the salary scale and may also receive a recruitment and retention allowance up to a maximum of up to £3,500.
About the role
Our content designers work in fast-paced delivery teams to create clear, user-led content for digital services.They work closely with user researchers and designers to challenge assumptions and test ideas, writing content which meets user needs as clearly and quickly as possible.
You’ll be:
- confident working with user needs and identifying how content within transactional services meets those needs
- able to take complex language and processes and make them simple to understand
- comfortable explaining your decisions to stakeholders who don’t understand web usability
- passionate about what you bring to service delivery, and be an advocate for user needs within the team and the wider department
Responsibilities
Day to day you’ll:
- scope, write and edit digital content for complex internal and externally-facing transactional services
- ensure customer journeys are the best they can be
- manage relationships with subject matter experts to make sure content is accurate
- deliver content that is accurate, timely, relevant, easy to understand, SEO optimised and written to style
- choose the best format to deliver content to the user and identify gaps
- manage the fact-checking process with policy and legal colleagues
- publish content quickly and efficiently
- monitor the performance of content and tools and work with multidisciplinary teams to understand user behaviour and feedback
- identify ways to improve content and iteratively improve the product
- be at ease in an Agile environment with rapidly changing deadlines, workloads and goals
Skills and experience
Essential
You'll have:
- demonstrable knowledge and passion for user centred design practices for public facing and internal services and applications
- experience of writing for the web, with proven ability to create usable and accessible content
- experience of working in a multidisciplinary team in an Agile development environment
- experience in content publishing systems
Desirable
Ideally, you’ll have:
- experience of working within a web application development environment, and be proficient in Markdown, picture sourcing and editing
- experience in using metrics and user feedback to define and refine content
- experience across devices (desktop, tablet and mobile), tools and transactional services, especially those with complex user journeys
- knowledge of GOV.UK and the Government Digital Service Standard
Senior Content Designer
Salary
£47,022 to £55,957
Civil Service grade: Grade 7
Successful candidates with exceptional skills and experience may be paid at the top end of the salary scale and may also receive a recruitment and retention allowance up to a maximum of up to £4,000.
About the role
Our content designers work in fast-paced delivery teams to create clear, user-led content for digital services.They work closely with user researchers and designers to challenge assumptions and test ideas, writing content which meets user needs as clearly and quickly as possible.
You’ll be:
- confident working with user needs and identifying how content within transactional services meets those needs
- able to take complex language and processes and make them simple to understand
- comfortable explaining your decisions to stakeholders who don’t understand web usability
- an experienced leader, comfortable with mentoring and developing junior staff and raising quality and setting standards across Home Office services
- passionate about what you bring to service delivery, and be an advocate for user needs within the team and the wider department
Responsibilities
Day to day you’ll:
- lead and mentor a team of 2 content editors working across projects
- scope, write and edit digital content for complex internal and externally-facing transactional services
- ensure customer journeys are the best they can be
- manage relationships with subject matter experts to make sure content is accurate
- deliver content that is accurate, timely, relevant, easy to understand, SEO optimised and written to style
- choose the best format to deliver content to the user and identify gaps
- manage the fact-checking process with policy and legal colleagues
- publish content quickly and efficiently
- monitor the performance of content and tools and work with multidisciplinary teams to understand user behaviour and feedback
- identify ways to improve content and iteratively improve the product
- be at ease in an Agile environment with rapidly changing deadlines, workloads and goals
Skills and experience
Essential
You’ll have:
- demonstrable knowledge and passion for user centred design practices for public facing and internal services and applications
- extensive experience of writing for the web, with proven ability to create usable and accessible content
- experience of working in a multidisciplinary team in an agile development environment
- experience in content publishing systems
Desirable
Ideally, you’ll have:
- proven experience of working within a web application development environment, and be proficient in Markdown, picture sourcing and editing
- experience in using metrics and user feedback to define and refine content
- exceptional skills in convincing people that user needs and usable approach is the only way to present information
- experience across devices (desktop, tablet and mobile), tools and transactional services, especially those with complex user journeys
- knowledge of GOV.UK and the Government Digital Service Standard
Delivery Managers
Salary
£27,482 to £32,703
Civil Service grade: Higher Executive Officer
Successful candidates with exceptional skills and experience may be paid at the top end of the salary scale and may also receive a recruitment and retention allowance up to a maximum of up to £1,750.
About the role
Our delivery managers work in small, focused teams, delivering quality user experience-led solutions for our customers. We are truly Agile and this is reflected in the co-location of our product owners with the delivery teams, our small iterative releases, modern development techniques and our culture of openness, participation and ownership.
You'll be someone who:
- is confident working in an Agile environment
- doesn't have a hierarchical mindset but enjoys being part of a flat culture
- believes that collaborating with team members brings about the best delivery results
- values educating and mentoring your team members on Agile practices, and is willing to learn from them as well
- is keen to contribute to organisational development by involving yourself and others in co-curricular activities like 'lunch and learns'
- is enthusiastic about sharing and receiving constructive feedback with your team members
Responsibilities
Day to day you'll:
- manage sprint planning, reviews and retrospectives for your team
- deflect distractions and remove blockers
- work with burndown/ups, velocity, defect analysis and other trending information to maintain quality and delivery
- hold retrospectives and actively use the outcomes to improve team delivery
- provide status communications to program and business teams
Skills and experience
Essential
You'll have:
- experience of delivering quality products and services in a fast paced Agile environment
- experience of enabling multi-disciplinary teams to successfully deliver software solutions into a production environment
- experience of promoting and demonstrating the use of Agile delivery methodologies
- demonstrable experience of the pragmatic application of a number of Agile delivery techniques
- a working knowledge of Agile and XP techniques
Desirable
Ideally you'll have:
- experience of delivering software with teams using CI and CD techniques
- knowledge and experience of working with teams using BDD and TDD
Senior Delivery Manager
Salary
£47,022 to £55,957
Civil Service grade: Grade 7
Successful candidates with exceptional skills and experience may be paid at the top end of the salary scale and may also receive a recruitment and retention allowance up to a maximum of up to £2,500.
About the role
Our delivery managers work in small, focused teams, delivering quality user experience-led solutions for our customers. We are truly Agile and this is reflected in the co-location of our product owners with the delivery teams, our small iterative releases, modern development techniques and our culture of openness, participation and ownership.
You'll be someone who:
- is confident working in an Agile environment
- doesn't have a hierarchical mindset but enjoys being part of a flat culture
- believes that collaborating with team members brings about the best delivery results
- values educating and mentoring your team members on Agile practices, and is willing to learn from them as well
- is keen to contribute to organisational development by involving yourself and others in co-curricular activities like 'lunch and learns'
- is enthusiastic about sharing and receiving constructive feedback with your team members
Responsibilities
Day to day you'll:
- manage sprint planning, reviews and retrospectives for one or more teams
- deflect distractions and remove blockers
- work with burndown/ups, velocity, defect analysis and other trending information to maintain quality and delivery
- hold retrospectives and actively use the outcomes to improve team delivery
- provide status communications to program and business teams
- create, maintain and conduct Agile training/coaching as required
- actively coach the more junior members of staff
Skills and experience
Essential
You'll have:
- significant experience of delivering quality products and services in a fast paced Agile environment
- solid experience of enabling multi-disciplinary teams to successfully deliver software solutions into a production environment
- experience of promoting and demonstrating the use of Agile delivery methodologies as well as managing stakeholders who don't understand or appreciate Agile
- demonstrable experience of the pragmatic application of a number of Agile delivery techniques
- a sound working knowledge of Agile and XP techniques
Desirable
Ideally you'll have:
- experience of delivering software with teams using CI and CD techniques
- knowledge and experience of working with teams using BDD and TDD
- presented at local meet-ups
Designers
Salary
£34,588 to £39,742
Civil Service grade: Senior Executive Officer
Successful candidates with exceptional skills and experience may be paid at the top end of the salary scale and may also receive a recruitment and retention allowance up to a maximum of up to £3,500.
About the role
As a designer you’ll be responsible for designing services so good that people prefer to use them.
Our designers work closely with user researchers, developers and the product team to design services focused on user needs.
They work by prototyping and iterating: testing ideas quickly with real users and using prototypes to learn, moving to working with code as early as possible.
We don’t produce documentation purely for sign-off, and we don’t throw wireframes ‘over the wall’. Work ranges from sketches, through to HTML prototypes, workshops, and participating in user research.
Responsibilities
This role is about challenging assumptions, testing ideas, meeting user needs and testing how well those needs have been met.
Day to day you’ll:
- work as part of a multi-disciplinary team to design user focused and successful services
- deliver designs that meet modern web standards, ensuring that key elements are built in from the outset
- contribute to the development and continual enhancement of digital services, and be capable of working across multiple services where required
- take ownership of design prototypes that seek to answer questions, and meet project priorities
- partner with colleagues to create a consistent user experience
- give input to the team and stakeholders on the relative priority of work
- share expertise in how design decisions impact accessibility - internally and externally
- communicate credibly with a wide range of digital delivery disciplines both internally and externally
Skills and experience
You’ll need experience of agile delivery and of forming close partnerships within digital service teams. You’ll ideally have a degree in a design related subject, an interest in design history and the possibilities of the web, and an understanding of how form and function work together. You’ll proactively seek new learning opportunities and welcome constructive criticism of your work.
Essential
You’ll have:
- a degree in design, human-computer interaction or relevant industry experience
- demonstrable knowledge, experience in and passion for user centred design practices
- proven experience working in a design environment on a range of projects, and designing interactions for the web and mobile
- core skills which include sketching, prototyping and communicating design concepts
- an interest in modern web standards and development practice
Desirable
Ideally, you’ll have:
- the ability to clearly explain and discuss design challenges and possible solutions
- some experience of prototyping using HTML & CSS
- knowledge of GOV.UK and the Digital by Default Service Standard
- working knowledge of typography and its importance in communication
- experience of using research to iterate and validate design choices
Senior Designers
Salary
£47,022 to £55,957
Civil Service grade: Grade 7
Successful candidates with exceptional skills and experience may be paid at the top end of the salary scale and may also receive a recruitment and retention allowance up to a maximum of up to £4,000.
About the role
This role is about challenging assumptions, testing ideas, meeting user needs and testing how well those needs have been met.
Responsibilities
Day to day you’ll:
- work as part of a multi-disciplinary team to design user focused and successful services
- deliver designs that meet modern web standards, ensuring that key elements are built in from the outset
- contribute to the development and continual enhancement of digital services, and be capable of working across multiple services where required
- partner with colleagues to create a consistent user experience
- build relationships and work effectively with external providers like user experience professionals
- share expertise in how design decisions impact accessibility - internally and externally
- communicate credibly with a wide range of digital delivery disciplines both internally and externally
- take the lead on activities to upskill staff, providing shadowing opportunities and direct hands-on experiences, specific training, sharing expertise and mentoring interns and junior designers
Skills and experience
You’ll need experience of agile delivery and of forming close partnerships within digital service teams. You’ll ideally have a degree in a design related subject, an interest in design history and possibilities of the web, and an understanding of how form and function work together. You’ll proactively seek new learning opportunities and welcome constructive criticism of your work.
Essential
You’ll have:
- a degree in design, human-computer interaction or relevant industry experience
- significant experience working in a design environment on a range of projects
- expertise in designing interactions professionally for the web and mobile
- core skills which include sketching, prototyping and communicating design concepts
- deep knowledge of modern web standards and development practice
- the ability to clearly explain and discuss design challenges and possible solutions
- experience working in agile, multi-disciplinary teams, and the ability to deliver iterative design components (including use journeys) to the development team
- experience across devices, platforms, tools and transactional services, especially those with complex user journeys
Desirable
Ideally, you’ll have:
- the ability to prototype using HTML and CSS
- knowledge of GOV.UK and the Digital by Default Service Standard
- working knowledge of typography and its importance in communication
- experience of designing accessible services, and the challenge of designing for a diverse audience
- experience using research to iterate and validate design choices
Developers
Salary
£27,482 to £32,703
Civil Service grade: Higher Executive Officer
Successful candidates with exceptional skills and experience may be paid at the top end of the salary scale and may also receive a recruitment and retention allowance up to a maximum of up to £3,000.
About the role
Home Office Digital is building a development team in Sheffield. We want really talented developers who have started their career and are looking for the next step to challenge themselves and build their skills. You'll join a team where you'll be working with other skilled and motivated people, with a culture that promotes openness, participation and ownership.
You'll be someone who:
- loves exploring new technologies on your own
- feels being hands-on in multiple tech tasks is necessary for your technical growth
- strives to keep yourself up to date with the latest developments/ trends in software
- has rational opinions about frameworks, languages, editors etc, whether they are open source/proprietary
- is focused on delivering the best solution to clients and evaluates technologies accordingly
Responsibilities
Day to day you'll:
- use solid XP practices working in a multi-skilled team to develop production ready software
- ensure all software built is robust and scalable
- actively participate in knowledge sharing with others in your team
Skills and experience
You'll have experience of the following:
Technical skills
- Java
- other JVM languages (Groovy, Scala, Clojure etc) Spring and Spring MVC Velocity
- Webservices - both REST/JSON and SOAP
- build tools (SBT, Gradle, Maven, Ant)
- version control (GIT, Subversion etc)
- Mocking (Mockito, EasyMock, JMock, Spock)
- Selenium
- Tomcat
- Microservices, Docker etc
- Mongo (and other NoSQL databases)
- Intellij or Eclipse
- Linux/Unix
- understanding of wider web and networks technologies
Process and practices
- Agile
- Scrum
- TDD/BDD
- CI/CD
- XP
Senior Developers
Salary
£47,022 to £55,957
Civil Service grade: Grade 7
Successful candidates with exceptional skills and experience may be paid at the top end of the salary scale and may also receive a recruitment and retention allowance up to a maximum of up to £4,000.
About the role
Home Office Digital is building a development team in Sheffield. We want really talented developers who have started their career and are looking for the next step to challenge themselves and build their skills. You'll join a team where you'll be working with other skilled and motivated people, with a culture that promotes openness, participation and ownership.
You'll be someone who:
- loves exploring new technologies on your own
- feels being hands-on in multiple tech tasks is necessary for your technical growth
- strives to keep yourself up to date with the latest developments/ trends in software
- has rational opinions about frameworks, languages, editors etc, whether they are open source/proprietary
- is focused on delivering the best solution to clients and evaluates technologies accordingly
Responsibilities
Day to day you'll:
- be hands on with development - this is no 'ivory tower' role
- set up the build pipelines, ensuring solid XP practices are adhered to from development through to deployment and into production
- work with multiple delivery teams to provide guidance on the best practices and tools to use in an XP/agile environment
- recruit and motivate highly skilled developers in a distributed environment
- ensure all software built is robust and scalable
- work with the internal architecture teams to ensure collaborative solutions between the Digital team and the wider IT teams
Skills and experience
You'll have experience of the following:
Technical skills
- Java
- other JVM languages (Groovy, Scala, Clojure etc) Spring and Spring MVC Velocity
- webservices - both REST/JSON and SOAP
- build tools (SBT, Gradle, Maven, Ant)
- version control (GIT, Subversion etc)
- mocking (Mockito, EasyMock, JMock, Spock)
- Selenium
- Tomcat
- Microservices, Docker etc
- Mongo (and other NoSQL databases)
- Intellij or Eclipse
- Linux/Unix
- understanding of wider web and networks technologies
Processes and practices
- Agile
- Scrum
- TDD/BDD
- CI/CD
- XP
Dev Ops
Salary
£34,588 to £39,742
Civil Service grade: Senior Executive Officer
Successful candidates with exceptional skills and experience may be paid at the top end of the salary scale and may also receive a recruitment and retention allowance up to a maximum of up to £3,500.
About the role
The concept of Dev Ops has been enthusiastically adopted by Home Office Digital across its delivery estate. The growing development hub in Sheffield will require people who can support the development and delivery environments. We are looking for people who truly are 'Dev Ops' and can comfortably span development and operations.
We need people who can:
- provide built environments that can support non-standard machines and both internal and external development resource
- implement and support a process for the rapid deployment of services that match those of the best digital service providers
- provide issue management and resolution for services deployed by the team
Responsibilities
Day to day you'll:
- implement a process for the deployment of internally developed digital services from development environments into production
- be part of a 3rd line support function for internally developed and supported digital services
- implement an automated build and deployment capability
- build and support the development infrastructure for the team
- support and develop the automated build and deployment environments/processes
Skills and experience
Essential
Some experience of:
- working in a business critical digital environment, including mobile apps and web
- deploying to and managing services in captive data centres and Cloud solutions
- responsibility for issue capture, identification and resolution across a digital estate
You’ll have experience of the following:
Technical skills
- Java
- other JVM languages (Groovy, Scala, Clojure etc), Spring and Spring MCV Velocity
- webservices – both REST/JSON and SOAP
- build tools (SBT, Gradle, Maven, Ant)
- version control (GIT, Subversion etc)
- Mocking (Mockito, EasyMock, JMock, Spock)
- Selenium
- Tomcat
- Microservices, Docker etc
- Mongo (and other NoSQL databases)
- Intellij or Eclipse
- Linux/Unix
- wider web and networks technologies
Processes and practices
- Agile
- Scrum
- TDD
- CI
- Pair programming
Senior Dev Ops
Salary
£47,022 to £55,957
Civil Service grade: Grade 7
Successful candidates with exceptional skills and experience may be paid at the top end of the salary scale and may also receive a recruitment and retention allowance up to a maximum of up to £4,000.
About the role
The concept of Dev Ops has been enthusiastically adopted by Home Office Digital across its delivery estate. The growing development hub in Sheffield will require people who can support the development and delivery environments. We are looking for people who truly are 'Dev Ops' and can comfortably span development and operations.
We need people who can:
- provide built environments that can support non-standard machines and both internal and external development resource
- implement and support a process for the rapid deployment of services that match those of the best digital service providers
- provide issue management and resolution for services deployed by the team
Responsibilities
Day to day you’ll:
- devise and implement a process for the deployment of internally developed digital services from development environments into production
- set up a 3rd line support function for internally developed and supported digital services
- build and implement an automated build and deployment capability
- agree with key stakeholders and document the build and deployment process for digital services
- build and support the development infrastructure for the team
- support and develop the automatic build and deployment environments/processes
Skills and experience
You'll have significant experience of:
- working in a business critical digital environment, including mobile apps and web
- deploying to and managing services in captive data centres and Cloud solutions
- responsibility for issue capture, identification and resolution across a digital estate
- recruiting and running multi-disciplinary teams accountable for managing digital services, including second line support and Dev Ops
You’ll have experience of the following:
Technical skills
- Java
- other JVM languages (Groovy, Scala, Clojure etc), Spring and Spring MCV Velocity
- webservices – both REST/JSON and SOAP
- build tools (SBT, Gradle, Maven, Ant)
- version control (GIT, Subversion etc)
- Mocking (Mockito, EasyMock, JMock, Spock)
- Selenium
- Tomcat
- Microservices, Docker etc
- Mongo (and other NoSQL databases)
- Intellij or Eclipse
- Linux/Unix
- wider web and networks technologies
Processes and practices
- Agile
- Scrum
- TDD
- CI
- Pair programming
Head of Development Profession
Salary
£57,603 to £68,547
Civil Service grade: Grade 6
Successful candidates with exceptional skills and experience may be paid at the top end of the salary scale and may also receive a recruitment and retention allowance up to a maximum of up to £4,333.
About the role
Home Office Digital works across the breadth of Home Office delivery, from passports to police, and visas to borders. This is an ideal opportunity for an experienced Technical Lead to join a team that embraces a start up culture but is also building core digital products and services that will have a positive impact on millions of people.
You won't be an ‘ivory tower’ architect, but will relish working closely with the developers and other members of the technical community to deliver user focused solutions for the Home Office.
You'll also:
- love exploring new technologies on your own
- strive to keep yourself up to date with the latest developments/trends in software
- have rational opinions about technology stacks
- be focused on delivering the best solutions to the business taking a balanced view of the requirements and available technology
Responsibilities
Day to day you'll:
- ensure Home Office Digital Sheffield has a technical strategy that aligns to the requirements of the wider Home Office and meets the needs of the development teams
- collaborate with other architects in the Home Office to ensure cross departmental alignment
- provide hands-on technical leadership, in the development, operation and ongoing improvement of complex, transformational digital services serving millions of users
- work with product managers and developers to understand user needs for new and existing services as part of a Front Door function
- act as the technical authority in prospective, information gathering and scene setting meetings with other government departments, evaluate technical proposals from external suppliers, and make implementation recommendations to senior stakeholders
- work with delivery teams and partners to break technical requirements down into appropriate pieces
- ensure that new and updated platforms, products and transactions are thoroughly tested for performance, are able to handle specified load, and can be maintained over the long-term
- work with external suppliers to ensure that their system architectures are robust, scalable, open and secure, with appropriate overall system design and integration points/APIs, to deliver a high quality user experience
- advise on evolutionary software architecture to government departments and agencies
- provide mentorship and/or line management for software developers and junior software developers
- assist with building a culture of continuous delivery and improvement, ensuring that key systems are regularly analysed, maintained and improved
Skills and experience
Essential
You'll have:
- comprehensive and recent experience designing and implementing complex software systems, i.e. is an active software developer currently engaged in architecting and building high-volume digital services
- proven capability in managing technology implementation projects and in presenting to / working with stakeholders at every level of seniority
- a demonstrable track record of successfully taking an evolutionary architecture approach to software architecture
- focused on strategic alignment of technical design and architecture to meet business growth and direction
- knowledge of Agile product management, in particular determination of vision, objectives, goals and success criteria
- experience of developing product roadmaps, backlogs and measurable success criteria, and of writing user stories, i.e. can establish a path to delivery for breaking down stories
- experience organising and performing prototyping and proof of concepts
- experience with Agile methodologies (TDD, SCRUM, Kanban, etc)
- built and scaled high-traffic websites and/or high volume transaction processing and analysis platforms
- experience designing and implementing scalable and robust approaches to caching, security and databases (including relational, e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL, and “NoSQL”, e.g. Cassandra, MongoDB)
- experience with automated configuration management, deployment and testing solutions
- used and implemented modern front end web programming techniques, such as HTML5, CSS3, AJAX, REST, JSON
- experience with a web programming framework such as Django, Ruby on Rails, Scala / Play etc
- developed and used web-based APIs (especially REST-based APIs)
- experience with open source solutions and community
- used and deployed on Cloud based platforms
- experience of sharing knowledge and working in a multi-disciplinary team
Home Team Admin
Salary
£22,961 to £26,406
Civil Service grade: Executive Officer
About the role
Home Office Digital is building a Development Hub in Sheffield. The vision is for a team capable of supporting development from initial conversation, through development and into production. This team will become a permanent feature in Sheffield for the Home Office and will need administrative support to ensure the successful delivery and support of great Digital products and services for the Home Office. This is a great opportunity to join a growing team that will impact the lives of many people.
We need someone who can work with very little direction and is adept at ensuring the office runs smoothly.
Responsibilities
Day to day you'll:
- work with the Head of the Home team in the management of the Hub's budgets and ensuring the development teams are properly accounting for their time
- help the Head of the Home Team maintain a resource plan
- work with the Home Team in London to ensure alignment of budgets and people plans
- be part of the team administering the Front Door process
- help organise events involving both internal and external resources
- ensure all office supply requirements are met
- manage the diary of the Head of Hub and assist other members of the team with booking requirements
Skills and experience
Essential
You'll have:
- experience of managing budgets
- exceptional organisational skills
- experience of managing people
- engagement and communication skills
Desirable
Ideally you'll have:
- knowledge of running agile/XP delivery projects
Head of Home Team Admin
Salary
£27,482 to £32,703
Civil Service grade: Higher Executive Officer
About the role
Home Office Digital is building a Development Hub in Sheffield. The vision is for a team capable of supporting development from initial conversation, through development and into production. This team will become a permanent feature in Sheffield for the Home Office and will need administrative support to ensure the successful delivery and support of great Digital products and services for the Home Office. This is a great opportunity to join a growing team that will impact the lives of many people.
We need someone who can work with very little direction to set up and manage the processes needed for the hub to operate efficiently and accountably.
Responsibilities
Day to day you'll:
- devise and manage the process for managing the Hub's budgets and ensuring the development teams are properly accounting for their time
- work with the Front Door and delivery team leads to plan resource
- maintain a resource plan
- liaise with the Home Team in London to ensure alignment of budgets and people plans
- work with the technical leads to devise and manage a process for the management for development requests into the team, ensuring alignment across Home Office digital and technology teams
- work with the head of the hub to organise events involving both internal and external resources
- manage the person responsible for office administration
Skills and experience
Essential
You'll have:
- experience of managing budgets
- exceptional organisational skills
- experience of managing people
- engagement and communication skills
Desirable
- knowledge of running agile/XP delivery projects
Senior Product Manager
Salary
£47,022 to £55,957
Civil Service grade: Grade 7
Successful candidates with exceptional skills and experience may be paid at the top end of the salary scale and may also receive a recruitment and retention allowance up to a maximum of up to £4,000.
About the role
Great products don't make themselves. We're looking for someone who can provide the vision and direction the operations and development teams require.
You'll be someone who understands the intersection between technology, business requirements and the user experience. You'll use this knowledge to devise a product strategy for the Home Office in Sheffield and encourage the continuous and iterative improvement of key products.
Responsibilities
Day to day you’ll:
- promote your product vision and definition by articulating a compelling vision
- inspire one or more multi-disciplinary Agile delivery teams to develop new products and iterate existing products to meet user needs
- provide substantial input to the initial triage of ideas by the Digital Front Door team to ensure a well developed pipeline of financed work
- help to define a Product roadmap in conjunction with technical experts in the team
- ensure that the needs of the user, both internal and external, are taken into account
You’ll also:
- maximise value for money by encouraging the development of products that can be iterated, adapted and reused across government departments
- keep continually abreast of changes to user habits, preferences and behaviours and understand their implications for successful delivery of government digital services
- ensure delivery of digital services is underpinned by qualitative and quantitative user data
- be a digital leader, sharing your in-depth understanding of the digital marketplace, including best practice, costs, suppliers, methodologies and skills with both internal and external stakeholders
- be actively involved across partner and user communities to promote the department’s principles and foster a collaborative approach to digital service delivery
Skills and experience
Essential
You’ll have:
- proven experience in delivery and ongoing management of high quality digital products
- demonstrable knowledge, experience and passion for user centred design
- excellent knowledge of the digital landscape, including mobile and responsive design, use of cloud technologies and multiplatform services
You can:
- combine user research, organisational strategy and business analysis to create a compelling product vision
- use your knowledge of digital development, agile processes, costs and estimation to come up with a credible product roadmap
Desirable
Ideally, you’ll have:
- knowledge of GOV.UK and the Government Digital Service Standard
- experience of delivering digital services in secure environments
- capability in the use of analytics, identifying patterns of use and making data driven product and strategy decisions
Service Designer
Salary
£47,022 to £55,957
Civil Service grade: Grade 7
Successful candidates with exceptional skills and experience may be paid at the top end of the salary scale and may also receive a recruitment and retention allowance up to a maximum of up to £4,000.
About the role
We're looking for talented, passionate service designers to join our expanding team in Sheffield. As a service designer you are responsible for designing services so good people prefer to use them. Our service designers work closely with user researchers, interaction designers, developers and the product team to design services focused on user needs.
This role is about challenging assumptions, testing ideas and translating user needs into a solution that meets those needs – and then to test how well those needs have been met. You will be comfortable considering the wider journey, how it fits together and the systems that underpin it.
Service design is a new discipline in the Home Office, and through your work you will develop services that demonstrate what excellent service design and service delivery looks like. That will include designing services that are efficient, cost effective, usable and satisfying. You’ll share your learnings with the wider design and research community (both within Home Office Digital and wider Government) and help promote service design and communicate the value it delivers.
Responsibilities
You'll:
- work across the Home Office to create new, usable and efficient services
- improve existing services by rationalising and joining-up transactions, reusing platforms and data, and planning internal processes and tools
- work by prototyping, iterating, and testing your ideas quickly. You'll prioritise taking rough ideas to real users over producing highly polished designs, and use prototypes to help the wider team learn about user needs for a given scenario or task
- iterate prototypes based on research with users to validate or invalidate design hypothesis, moving to working with code as early as possible
- be expected to work through collaboration. We don’t produce documentation purely for signoff, and we don’t throw designs over the wall. Work ranges from sketches, story and journey mapping, collaborative design, workshops, and participating in user research
Day to day you'll:
- analyse failure within services and identify root causes for that failure
- identify opportunities for cost reduction and improvement within an existing service
- understand user needs and identify where separate interactions and transactions with government should act as one service that meet that need
- arrange these separate interactions into rational user journeys within that service
- look for commonalities in activities across services where products could be made
- understand the existing supporting system of a service and design targeted improvements to that system to accommodate the new service - both digital and process based
- focus on balancing services so that they are usable and satisfying for internal users as well as external users
- create and rapidly iterate service prototypes
- identify and design new cross government service patterns and standards
- identify methods and opportunities to measure improvements and service performance through metrics
- create designs that use data to improve service delivery
- working as part of a multi-disciplined team to design user focussed and successful services that take appropriate channels and technical constraints
- facilitate and lead collaborative working with stakeholders from across the Home Office
- disseminate expertise of how service design decisions impact accessibility both internally and externally
- communicate credibly with a wide range of digital delivery disciplines and talent both internally and externally
- take the lead on activities designed to up-skill Home Office staff – providing shadowing opportunities and direct hands-on experiences, specific training, sharing expertise, and mentoring our interns, and Junior / Mid-weight designers
Skills and experience
You should have experience of agile digital delivery, be comfortable with deploying service design within agile, and of forming close partnerships within digital service teams.
Essential
You'll have a design related degree or relevant industry experience and be able to:
- prototype service experiences quickly through mock-ups, sketches and high-fidelity prototypes
- work quickly in an Agile environment
- explain ideas in a way that other people understand
- welcome constructive criticism and be able to review the work of others
- interpret user research
- remove complexity from services
- write for user interfaces
- explain design decisions and be able to represent a service at a service assessment
- assess a service and give constructive feedback
- put forward the case for design with a product manager
- collaborate on design with an interaction designer and with a developer
- engage the whole multidisciplinary team with the design process
- lead a workshop
- work at pace
Test Automation Engineers
Salary
£47,022 to £55,957
Civil Service grade: Grade 7
Successful candidates with exceptional skills and experience may be paid at the top end of the salary scale and may also receive a recruitment and retention allowance up to a maximum of up to £2,500.
About the role
All development at the Sheffield Development Hub will be conducted using Agile delivery methods. Therefore we're looking for people with substantial experience of working in and with self-starting Agile delivery teams.
You'll have hands-on experience of developing test solutions in a fast paced Lean/XP Agile environment and will:
- love exploring new technologies on your own
- strive to keep yourself up to date with the latest developments/trends in software
- have rational opinions about technology stacks
- be focused on delivering the best solutions to the business taking a balanced view of the requirements and available technology
- have no fear about raising issues to ensure that our products are delivered to the highest quality
Responsibilities
Day to day you'll:
- work in a multi-disciplinary team supporting the development of new applications
- ensure great quality software by using your automation skills to integrate the right tools and frameworks into the build pipeline
- promote a TDD/BDD orientation in the team
- guide the exploratory testing efforts
- support live applications - troubleshooting, defect triage, problem diagnosis, root cause analysis
Skills and experience
You’ll need a good understanding and solid experience of enterprise development, testing, deployment, configuration, troubleshooting and enterprise platforms.
Essential
You’ll have:
- strong knowledge of BDD across all the delivery pipeline
- a strong software development background
- test automation skills around tools and platforms linked with BDD such as Cucumber
- experience of automation tools such as Selenium web-driver
- solid experience of working on projects that use BDD tools for collaboration
- Java programming skills
- knowledge of databases/SQL
- a working knowledge of Continuous Integration (CI) methods and tools such as Jira, Jenkins or Hudson
- knowledge of build tools such as Gradle, Ant or Maven
- awareness and practice of UI performance best practices and cross-browser/device and cross-platform development
- exposure to the DevOps model
- strong exploratory skills
Desirable
Ideally, you’ll have exposure to:
- Apache Tomcat
- web technologies such as JSP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS
- Unix configuration and command line tools
- cloud based virtual servers and configurations such as Amazon AWS
- RESTful web services (JSON)
User Researchers
Salary
£34,588 to £39,742
Civil Service grade: Senior Executive Officer
Successful candidates with exceptional skills and experience may be paid at the top end of the salary scale and may also receive a recruitment and retention allowance up to a maximum of up to £2,000.
About the role
Our user researchers work within fast-paced delivery teams. They form close partnerships with designers, front-end developers and business analysts. They don’t spend time writing lengthy reports, but look for engaging ways to communicate findings to delivery teams and stakeholders across the department.
Responsibilities
Day to day you’ll:
- plan, design and conduct in-house usability testing sessions to support the design and development of government services
- lead the usability testing process, from developing user recruitment briefs, personas and user stories through to test moderation, analysis and report writing
- conduct in-house research to test new product and concept developments, including user requirements gathering and early stage concept and prototype testing, guerrilla research, and other approaches to ensuring the user needs are fully understood in the service design
- work with Service Managers/Product Owners to devise appropriate research strategies to generate focused insights and convert concepts into appropriate stimulus material (low or high fidelity)
- work closely with appropriate members of the team to turn user research findings into actionable product/service requirements
- apply knowledge in human factors, ethnography, and the user-centred design process to product and service design in an iterative development environment
Skills and experience
You’ll be:
- passionate about what you bring to service delivery
- a vocal advocate for user needs, within the team and the wider department
- comfortable with lean UX practices like guerrilla testing, paper prototyping and rapid analysis techniques that involve the wider team whenever possible
Essential
You’ll have:
- demonstrable knowledge of and passion for user centred design practices for both public facing and internal services
- proven experience of eliciting user needs for applications and services
- experience of managing, executing and analysing usability test sessions
- experience of working in an Agile environment with user experience teams, designers and developers to create new digital products/services and applications internal to an organisation
Desirable
Ideally you’ll have:
- experience across devices – desktop, tablet and mobile, tools and transactional services, especially those with complex user journeys
- experience of identifying and understanding user groups and communicating needs using methods such as design personas
- a degree in HCI, usability, cognitive psychology, market research or a related field
- training in research methods to understand the theory behind the practice
- experience within a research and digital environment
- knowledge of GOV.UK and the Government Digital Service Standard
Senior User Researcher
Salary
£47,022 to £55,957
Civil Service grade: Grade 7
Successful candidates with exceptional skills and experience may be paid at the top end of the salary scale and may also receive a recruitment and retention allowance up to a maximum of up to £2,500.
About the role
Our user researchers work within fast-paced delivery teams. They form close partnerships with designers, front-end developers and business analysts. They don’t spend time writing lengthy reports, but look for engaging ways to communicate findings to delivery teams and stakeholders across the department.
Responsibilities
Day to day you’ll:
- plan, design and conduct in-house usability testing sessions to support the design and development of government services
- lead the usability testing process from developing user recruitment briefs/personas and user stories, through to test moderation, analysis and report writing
- conduct in-house research to test new product and concept developments - including user requirements gathering, early stage concept and prototype testing, guerrilla research, and other approaches to unsure that user needs are fully understood in the service design
- work with Service Managers/Product Owners to devise appropriate research strategies to generate focused insights and convert concepts into appropriate stimulus material (low or high fidelity)
- work closely with the appropriate members of the team to turn user research findings into actionable product/service requirements
- apply knowledge in human factors, ethnography and the user-centred design process to product and service design in an iterative development environment
- present findings and related design/business recommendations and customer insights to senior decision makers ensuring that research findings are relayed quickly to teams and wider department/government where beneficial
- promote user-centred design principles and best practices within government
- mentor and train more junior members of the team in research techniques
Skills and experience
You’ll be:
- passionate about what you bring to service delivery
- a vocal advocate for user needs, within the team and the wider department
- comfortable with lean UX practices like guerrilla testing, paper prototyping and rapid analysis techniques that involve the wider team whenever possible
- self-sustaining, experienced in using a variety of user research methodologies and able to develop research strategy and test design tailored to a given service
Essential
You’ll have demonstrable knowledge and passion for user centred design practices and experience of:
- gathering user requirements for web based services
- managing, executing and analysing usability test sessions
- working in an Agile development environment with user experience teams, designers and developers to create new digital products and services
- identifying and understanding user groups and communicating needs using methods like design personas
- web content, tools and transactional services, especially those with complex user journeys
- a research and digital environment
- GOV.UK and the Government Digital Service Standard
Desirable
Ideally you’ll have a degree in HCI, usability, cognitive psychology, market research or a related field.
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