Senior Software Engineer

Made Tech is on a mission to use technology to improve society - for everyone. We help public sector organisations transform, deliver and manage world-class digital products and cloud services. We work with the UK government to modernise legacy technology and shape the digital future of the country. We support local government teams in building accessible services that make a real difference to people. And we help the NHS use technology to improve and save lives.

Made Tech has grown quickly, and has bold ambitions for the future. We know that growth and change can be unsettling (as well as exciting), so we are looking for people who enjoy this challenge, and want to help others thrive too.

About the role

Are you a Software Engineer that wants to actually see the real-world impact from what you help to create? Our mission is simple! We believe we can use tech to make public services better. We also believe this can happen best when our own team represents the society that actually uses the services we work on. At Made Tech, we’re collectively continuing to grow a culture that is happy, healthy, safe and inspiring for people of all backgrounds and experiences, so we encourage all people from underrepresented groups to apply for roles with us. Have we caught your interest? Please read on…

What does the job entail?

We primarily write and deliver custom software for the public sector. We work across central and local government, as well as in health, and our past lies in the technology startup world. Technical excellence for us isn’t about delivering to feature lists. We place a strong emphasis on outcome-based delivery; ensuring our customer’s goals are understood and achieved with the technology we deploy.

Senior Software Engineers find themselves working on a variety of different problems from monoliths to microservices, upskilling colleagues and customers, always finding themselves learning from others, while constantly striving to be nice humans 🙂

Our teams have used Java, Ruby, Python, ES6 with React, as well as C# with .NET Core. We don’t limit ourselves as a company and we expect all our Engineers to be keen on learning new technologies. Automation is important to our teams, so we make sure there is a CD pipeline set up to build, test, and release many times per day.

High performing software delivery teams need to be empowered to iteratively and rapidly deliver changes all the way through to production. To do this we combine our extensive cloud automation knowledge with DevOps culture.

We ensure we document our architecture and infrastructure as code, using technologies such as Terraform and OpenAPI. Containerisation is a big part of empowering our teams to develop, deploy and scale their applications, but so too is using AWS Lambda and avoiding the complexity of stateful services altogether. Right tool for the job.

For us, DevOps is about culture rather than roles and titles. Even though this role is for someone with strong DevOps experience, the biggest impact you will have is coaching and helping teams use the platforms you build. You won't be building infrastructure in isolation or charged with deploying other peoples work into production. You'll empower teams with the mantra: you build it, you run it!

We grow a team of language agnostic engineers, which you might already consider yourself to be, who are versed in a mix of paradigms such as object-oriented, functional, declarative, event-based and aspect-oriented. To create this environment our Senior Software Engineers need to embrace sharing their knowledge and skills with others, and they need to keep an open mind – we’d love to hear some examples of mentoring, coaching and growing team members. Maybe you will have written some blog posts about your discipline, or perhaps even delivered a talk or two.

What experience are we looking for?

We want our teams and individuals to grow. If you don’t have the following skills, you will have access to a learning budget, experienced team members and a wider learning and mentoring culture that can help you develop the following

Written code with tests

Delivery in an agile environment

Worked across a variety of programming languages

Worked with at least one Cloud platform

Worked with databases

Worked with APIs

Debugging experience in a range of systems

Evidence of self-development – we value keen learners

Drive to deliver outcomes for users

Desire to mentor others

Nice to Haves

Consultancy experience

Working directly with customers and users

Working within multidisciplinary teams with product, design, and technology working within the same cycles

Showcasing and presentation skills

Agile practices such as Scrum, XP, and/or Kanban

Pair programming – we pair around 50% of the time

Writing code with test-driven development

Component-based design techniques such as using pattern libraries, styled-components, CSS-in-JS, BEM, and/or SUIT CSS

Debugging infrastructure

Building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines

The React ecosystem including a test-driven approach

Infrastructure as code technology like Terraform and Cloud Formation

Familiarity with architectural and design patterns

Use of architectural decision records