23278 - Lead Developer (National)

Job description

About

Lead Developer

Location: National*

Closing Date: 30th October 2026

Interviews: w/c 16th November 2026

Grade: Grade 7

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

Salary**: London: £63,343 - £78,225 (which may include an allowance up to £14,882)

National: £58,511 - £73,450 (which may include an allowance up to £14,939)

Working pattern: Full-time, Part-time, Flexible working

Contract Type: Permanent

Number of vacancies: 4

Vacancy number: 23278

*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

Please note that unless you are an existing member of staff at Justice Digital, Data and Science, the only London location being recruited to is 10 South Colonnade, E14 4PU. We are no longer recruiting to 102 Petty France, SW1H 9AJ.

The Role

Please note this role requires you to pass Security Check clearance. Please click on the link for details.

We’re recruiting for Lead Software Developers here at Justice Digital, Data and Science to be part of our warm and collaborative Legal Aid Agency (LAA) Digital team.

This role aligns against Lead Developer from the Government Digital and Data Framework.

We really want to hear from people who value making a difference and building user-centred services using modern tools and practices as part of a highly collaborative team. We strongly encourage empathetic approaches and cross functional working and are looking for people to help build on this culture of agility and openness.

As an example, you could be helping teams that are:

· Building services to enhance an application for legal aid

· Developing services to process and review applications for legal aid caseworkers

· Providing access to court data

· Building services to provide access to historic applications

You’ll receive a range of excellent benefits when you join our department, including:

· A generous employer pension contribution of 28.97% through the Civil Service Pension Scheme.

· 25 days of annual leave, (increasing to 30 days once you have reached 5 years of service), plus 8 bank holidays and a privilege day for the King’s birthday.

· Flexible working arrangements including hybrid working, working part time or compressed hours. Designed to support a positive work–life balance.

· Employees are allocated 10% of their working time for personal and professional development.

· 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.

· 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!

You can find more details of the Benefits we offer here. To help picture your life at MoJ Justice Digital, Data and Science please take a look at our blog.

Key Responsibilities:

In addition to hands-on development, you will inspire, mentor, coach, manage and lead Software Developers within a business domain. You will focus on generating a culture of quality, maintaining balance between building sustainable well architected products and unlocking citizen value early.

The areas of your responsibility for leadership will shift between people, architecture, development and product strategy, depending on context and need.

You will have responsibility for one team, or two small related teams, and report to the Principal Developers.

Technical Leadership:

· Collaborate with Technical Architects and Product Managers to set product direction

· Collaborate with Technical Architects to help in the design of systems and implementation of coherent and sustainable technical roadmaps

· Lead discussions with Developers to nurture consensus on technical/team decisions

· Support backlog refinement, helping plan, define and prioritise actionable tasks for the team

· Build inclusivity and understanding by promoting strategies to share technical knowledge of our systems with appropriate documentation and other activities

· Support Delivery Managers in unblocking value where necessary and/or honest representations of effort in an agile environment as the teams learn more

Engineering Management:

· Managing, coaching and growing people with a focus on their wellbeing and development

· Support Delivery Managers in improving team maturity

Engineering Profession:

· Work with your local Principal Developers and the wider community to improve and maintain good coding standards and practices

· Help provide feedback on wider technical strategy of your business unit

· Share knowledge and build enthusiasm for sharing via activities like brown bags, cooperative workshops, chat discussions and other means

· Encourage open discussion and drive communities in our primary communication tools

· Have a mindset for growth and learning, looking for emerging technologies, tools and good practice

· Help build and maintain a diverse, inclusive culture across the development community, growing awareness, inclusivity, and balance

· Take part in the recruitment and onboarding of other Developers

Our Tech Stack

We rely on Java, Python or Ruby to write our application code, 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 with Express.js and TypeScript, and we assess all our services against accessibility criteria.