Senior Ruby Software Developer

Location: National*

Closing Date: 27th October

Interviews: w/c 11th November

Grade: G7

(MoJ candidates who are on a specialist grade, will be able to retain this grade on lateral transfer)

Salary (for more information, please refer to the T&Cs on the bottom):

London: £58,847 - £73,875 (which may include an allowance of up to £15,028)

National: £54,358 - £69,150 (which may include an allowance of up to £14,792)

Working pattern: Full time, Part time, Flexible working

Contract Type: Perm

Vacancy number: 91336

*We offer a hybrid working model, allowing for a balance between remote work and time spent in your local office. Office locations can be found ON THIS MAP

The Role

We’re recruiting for a Senior Ruby Software Developer here at Justice Digital, to be part of one of our warm and collaborative teams.

This role aligns against the Senior developer role from the Government Digital and Data Framework.

You’ll be confident working with other developers on our tech stack and comfortable learning new technologies and systems. We use a variety of different technologies and will work with you to place you in a team that matches your skills, interests and aspirations wherever possible.

As an example, you could be:

• Reducing reoffending rates by improving the scheduling of prison visits in our Prisons team
• Enhancing colleague visibility across justice by developing new features for the MoJ People Finder application
• Building a no-code platform for publishing government forms and services to the internet in the MoJ Forms team
• Maintaining transparency of government by managing freedom of information requests and parliamentary questions in our Central Digital team

You will work with user researchers, product managers, designers, delivery managers, technical architects and content specialists who share a vision for improving government through smarter use of technology.

To help picture your life at MoJ Justice Digital please take a look at our blog and our Digital and Technology strategy 2025.

Our Tech Stack

We use a range of technologies and we’re looking for people who specialise in one or more of them and who love learning new languages and frameworks. 

For example, we might use Ruby, NodeJS, to write our application code, Circle CI or GitHub Actions for CI/CD, Sentry for application monitoring, Kubernetes and Docker to schedule and run our services (read about our Cloud Platform), AWS for most of our infrastructure, GOV.UK Design System for our web interfaces and use Macbook Pros.

For front-end development, we value a robust understanding of the underlying web technologies. We value well-maintained, open-source tools that can be used to produce semantic HTML, performant CSS and unobtrusive JavaScript or TypeScript, and we assess all our services against accessibility criteria.

We’re happy to help you learn our tech stack once you’re part of our team, and do not require an exact match in your experience of languages. Check out GitHub for a closer look at the technologies we use, and a complete list of services that we build and maintain. We subscribe to the manifesto for agile software development.

Our Community

We currently have over 200-250 experienced developers who make up the engineering community across the MoJ. You will coach and mentor junior colleagues and take part in informal support networks with your peers. You will be encouraged to play an active role in the engineering community and culture.

We take the responsibility of supportive and effective line management very seriously. We will value the skills you bring to the civil service and help you to build on them. When the time is right we will support moving between teams or government departments to learn different technologies or take on more responsibility, according to your career goals.

Take a look at our developer blog and Justice Digital blog to get a sense of our work and culture.

Key Responsibilities

As a Senior Software Developer at the MoJ, you will have technical and people responsibilities.

Technical:

• Securely designing, building and maintaining APIs, services and systems
• Working on pre-existing codebases 
• Improving the resilience and stability of software
• Applying practices to enable continuous delivery

People:

• Developing and influencing people via line management duties, informal and formal coaching, and mentoring
• Supporting lead developers in building high-performing teams
• Helping to build and maintain a diverse, inclusive culture across the development community, growing awareness, inclusivity, and balance

If this feels like an exciting challenge, something you are enthusiastic about, and want to join our team please read on and apply!

Benefits

• 37 hours per week and flexible working options including working from home, working part-time, job sharing, or working compressed hours
• A £1k per person learning budget is in place to support all our people, with access to best-in-class conferences and seminars, accreditation with professional bodies, fully funded vocational programmes and e-learning platforms 
• Staff have 10% time to dedicate to develop & grow
• Generous civil service pension based on a defined benefit scheme, with employer contributions of 28.97% from April 1st 2024 (Contribution Rates)
• 25 days leave (plus bank holidays) and 1 privilege day usually taken around the Kings’ birthday. 5 additional days of leave once you have reached 5 years of service
• Compassionate maternity, adoption, and shared parental leave policies, with up to 26 weeks leave at full pay, 13 weeks with partial pay, and 13 weeks further leave. And maternity support/paternity leave at full pay for 2 weeks, too!
• Wellbeing support including access to the Calm app
• Bike loans up to £2500 and secure bike parking (subject to availability and location)
• Season ticket loans, childcare vouchers and eye-care vouchers
• 5 days volunteering paid leave
• Free membership to BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT
• Some offices may have a subsidised onsite Gym

Person Specification

You will:

• Apply modern development and deployment techniques to your work, including continuous integration and continuous delivery
• Champion software maintenance, clean code, coding standards and practices that make change and consistency easier
• Write automated tests to continuously validate your work
• Thrive when you work as part of a team that abides by the spirit of the manifesto of agile software development
• Have awareness of technologies used for web applications, e.g databases, microservices, backups, CDNs and search, DevOps and Unix-like operating systems
• Enjoy sharing knowledge and working in a multi-disciplinary team
• Hold yourself and others to a high standard
• Solve problems in a systematic way

You’ll value:

• Continuous learning and development
• Being inclusive, supportive, inquisitive and responsible (MoJ D&T core values)
• Working with integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality (Civil Service core values)

Willingness to be assessed against the requirements for BPSS clearance.

The Civil Service is committed to attracting, retaining and investing in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan and the Civil Service D&I Strategy.

How to Apply

Candidates must submit a CV and a Statement of Suitability (up to 750 words) which describes how you meet the requirements set out in the Person Specification above.

In Justice Digital, we recruit using a combination of the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability and Success Profiles Frameworks. We will assess your Experience, Technical Skills and the following Behaviours during the assessment process:

• Working Together
• Developing Self and Others
• Making Effective Decisions

A diverse panel will review your application against the Person Specification above.

Successful candidates who meet the required standard will then be invited to a 60-minute panel interview held via video conference. A small technical test will need to be completed in advance, as it will be discussed and developed during the interview.

Should we receive a high volume of applications, a pre-sift based on recent experience as a Developer will be conducted prior to the sift.

Should you be unsuccessful in the role that you have applied for, but have demonstrated the capability for a role at a lower level, we reserve the right to discuss this opportunity with you and potentially offer you the position without the need for a further application.

A reserve list may be held for a period of up to 12 months from which further appointments may be made.

Terms & Conditions

Please review our Terms & Conditions which set out how we recruit and provide further information related to the role and salary arrangements.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact recruitment@digital.justice.gov.uk