Digital Java Developer Senior at Department for Work & Pensions, UK Office/Remote, 12 Months, £Contract Rate

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is responsible for welfare, pensions, and child maintenance policy. As the UK’s biggest public service department, it administers the State Pension and a range of working age, disability and ill health benefits to around 20 million claimants and customers. As such, we operate on a scale that is almost unmatched anywhere in Europe and most people in Britain come into contact with us at some point in their lives.

Working with DWP, you will be helping us to drive our priorities to:

• Run an effective welfare system that enables people to achieve financial independence by providing assistance and guidance into employment
• Increase saving for, and security in later life
• Create a fair and affordable welfare system which improves the life chances of children
• Deliver outstanding services to our customers and claimants
• Deliver efficiently: transform the way we deliver our services to reduce costs and increase productivity.

As a Java Developer Senior your main responsibilities will be: 

We are looking for an outstanding Java Developer, who can make a positive impact, and wants to contribute to the most demanding and exciting new digital service for the UK Government.  Let’s be clear about the impact of your work - better digital services in government will change the face of public services and have the potential to dramatically and positively transform the future of millions of people.

We are looking for outstanding skills and you must be ready to quickly get to work within an Agile, multidisciplinary team of Developers, Designers, and Analysts focused on the Department for Work and Pensions’ flagship welfare reform programme.

We are looking for the kind of person who is unconcerned with titles and hierarchy; what really excites the successful candidate is problem-solving and the opportunity to deliver innovative technology that carries real value for users. The candidate will be expected to draw value from collaboration with others, actively seek input from colleagues and value a multidisciplinary team over hierarchy.

Day-to-day they will be an integral part of that team in designing, creating and improving new and existing products, platforms and transactions across government.

You’ll have relevant experience in:

• Recent experience with Java 11 (or later).
• Excellent understanding of TDD and BDD.
• Experience with large microservice architectures.
• Experience of working in an Agile environment.
• Be willing to work in a pair programming environment.
• Have experience in implementing APIs for internal and external use.
• Have the skills to build up a useful, robust automated test suite to support a continuous deployment environment.
• Be involved in the wider web development community, identifying good practices we can adopt and sharing our experiences.
• Be knowledgeable of tools and techniques used within the wider team.
• Take part in 2nd-line support of applications and platforms, including occasional support outside of office hours.
• Have an ability to communicate technical concepts to a non-technical audience.
• Have working knowledge of Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and/or Mac OS X.
• Have the ability to quickly research and learn new programming tools and techniques.
• Understand of the use of Responsive Web Design.

Desirable skills:

• Working knowledge of Jackson, JAX-RS, mocking frameworks such as Mockito, and messaging platforms such as ActiveMQ or Kafka.
• Experience of MongoDB or other document databases.
• Experience of building and scaling high-traffic websites.
• Experience of handling large data sets and scaling their handling and storage.