Senior BackEnd Engineer- Remote

The Office for National Statistics is the UK's largest producer of official statistics, and the only government department who produce statistics as its principal role. Never has there been a more exciting time to join us. Our mission: High quality data and analysis to inform the nation and improve lives.

The core principles that will deliver this mission are:

• Radical in how we take opportunities to innovate and collaborate, using data for the public good

• Ambitious in answering the cross-cutting analytical needs of government, communities, businesses and society

• Sustainable by delivering a unique and efficient service through partnership and collaboration

• Inclusive through partnerships, our workforce, and the design of data, statistics and analysis

About Our Team

In Digital Publishing, we are responsible for the ONS website, its corresponding Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and content management system. We are a multidisciplinary team of frontend, backend, and full stack engineers, interaction designers, user researchers, tech leads and product and delivery managers.

We work in an inclusive environment, and want all members of our team to feel they can contribute ideas to how we approach challenges. We value a willingness to accept new ideas and be questioned on our own preconceptions.

As a Backend Engineer, you will be responsible for all technical aspects of the APIs and data pipelines, including design, development, security, maintenance and operations. You will mentor other members of the team to ensure their skills are relevant, up to date, transferrable and in line with industry standards and expectations.

We use the following technologies right now, but an interest in solving the problems we face is much more important than having experience in the technologies listed.

• Go

• Java

• Hashicorp stack (Nomad, Consul, Vault)

• Concourse

• AWS

• Kafka

• MongoDB

• AWS Neptune (using Gremlin)

• Docker

• ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana)

We know no two people will have the same experience, and that everyone's training needs will be different. We anticipate the first few weeks or sprints you’re with our team will be a combination of learning our technologies, getting to know your team and mutually learning how each other work best.

We provide training and guidance on the technologies we use, and the team will support you as you get to grips with our systems.

Responsibilities

Things you might do in the next 12 months

• Design, build and maintain public and private RESTful APIs to meet the needs of all of our users

• Design, build and maintain event-driven data import and export pipelines

• Develop and maintain infrastructure provisioning for the platform upon which your microservice applications run

• Implement tests and continuous integration pipelines for the microservice applications you build

• Identify security risks and technical debt which affect the products we build, working with your fellow developers to design and implement improvements and ensuring the value is being communicated to non-technical team members

• Participate in technical planning, design and code reviews

• Investigate and evaluate new technologies to identify the best tool for the job

• Use protected learning time to explore topics that are of interest to you and invest in projects you care about

• Respond to live issues and perform maintenance of the live service

Person Specification:

We’re looking for evidence of the following skills:

• Experience as a backend Software Engineer using strongly-typed languages.

• An understanding of developing production grade distributed systems.

• Willingness to admit what you don’t know, and enthusiasm for broadening your skills.

• Experience and enjoyment in coaching and developing fellow engineers, empowering them to design and build modern digital services.

• Ability to quickly research and learn new technologies and techniques.

• Ability to thrive in an open, autonomous and user-centred agile environment.

• Experience of communicating technical concepts to non technical people.

As this is a senior engineering role, we’re especially looking for evidence of considering the broader impact of your choices and taking on more responsibility for the team's approach.

Technical Skills

Evidence of your technical experience should be provided during your application, especially as it relates to the criteria in the Person Specification.
We’ll further assess your technical skills during the interview stage. The interview will contain 2 technical activities, a number of questions about how you work, and an opportunity for you to ask any questions you have about the role and the team. The interview will likely take between 60 and 90 minutes.

The 2 technical activities will be:

- A systems design question, which you will be presented with a few days before the interview and given time to prepare for. You’ll explain how you would solve a technical problem, and we’ll ask some questions to understand your approach to technical decision-making.

- A code review exercise, which you will be given during the interview. You will be able to choose between a Go or Java code snippet to review. You’ll talk us through how you would review the code; we use this to assess your technical understanding and ability to give constructive feedback.