Lead Software Developer (up to £97,887) at Department for Education in United Kingdom

Job summary

These are exciting times at the Department for Education. In 2026, we will continue to build services for all our users spanning all citizens in England.

As a lead software developer, you will be part of a team responsible for developing and supporting scalable, secure, and high-quality user-centric digital services. Working with senior colleagues, you will lead team members on the design and build of digital services and will work closely with colleagues within multidisciplinary agile teams, that focus on delivering work iteratively and at pace. You will innovate to radically transform how public services are delivered and improved.

Job description

The DfE is looking for a lead software developer who will add rigour and value to an organisation where software development across Data and Digital product delivery is still evolving. This is an exciting opportunity to help build and maintain a software development capability in a fast-paced environment within the Department.

You will be an experienced software development leader and practitioner, setting technical direction across the project, wider department and creating the conditions for teams to build maintainable, sustainable and user-centred digital products. You will work across organisational boundaries to improve engineering standards, enable effective delivery and develop the capability of the software development community.

As a Lead Software Developer you will:

• Be responsible for a team of developers, including line management
• Help lead the development community to ensure we build maintainable and sustainable digital products
• Stay up to date with, and support the creation/maintenance of, standards around development practices and techniques to best enable our teams to consistently deliver at pace
• Handle allocation of developers to teams, ensuring a good balance of personalities, skills and seniority, enabling the teams to deliver great services quickly
• Mentor development teams, helping ensure they're building things to our standards, and identifying opportunities for collaboration and career progression
• Advocate user-centric, agile approaches which focus on rapid, effective delivery of high-quality digital services
• Transform government into a modern, agile development centre by embedding practices like Test Driven Development, continuous deployment, and DevSecOps
• Support sharing of methods and technologies across teams, government, and the industry by helping to organise internal and external events
• Help publicise our achievements and learning through blog posts and social media
• Provide leadership for the support and operation of digital services, including the triage and resolution of significant software issues. Participate in an out-of-hours support rota where required, for which an allowance will be paid.

Person specification

Essential Criteria

Candidates must be able to demonstrate these essential experienced based skills:

• Expert practical experience of software development using C# .NET, together with strong knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and the ability to set technical direction and evaluate appropriate technologies across a varied software estate.
• Expert experience of creating, sustaining and assuring modern software development standards, practices and techniques across multiple teams, enabling consistent delivery of secure, accessible, maintainable and high-quality digital services.
• Significant experience of setting technical direction and potentially leading multiple technical teams to deliver user-focused services in an agile environment, including developing people, influencing senior stakeholders and resolving complex delivery and engineering challenges.
• Expert experience of establishing, embedding and assuring modern software development practices, including test-driven development, automated testing, CI/CD, DevSecOps and modern GitHub-based development workflows, with evidence of improving deployment quality, frequency and reliability.
• Expert experience of designing and assuring scalable, resilient cloud architectures using appropriate IaaS and PaaS services, with strong knowledge of infrastructure as code, containerisation, operability and cost-effective service design.
• Expert experience of applying and assuring software design principles, including object-oriented design, SOLID principles and design patterns, and of designing scalable, maintainable and loosely coupled architectures using RESTful APIs and microservices where appropriate.
• Expert understanding of web application security, including the OWASP Top 10, with significant experience of embedding secure development practices and assuring that security risks are identified, managed and addressed throughout the software delivery lifecycle.
• Significant experience of building software development capability through knowledge sharing, coaching and mentoring, leading a diverse and inclusive development community across multidisciplinary teams, and enabling the adoption of shared methods and technologies that improve the sustainability of digital products.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Leadership

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £73,334, Department for Education contributes

£21,244 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme.

Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

Applicants currently holding a permanent post in the Civil Service should note that, if successful, their salary on appointment would be determined by the Department’s transfer / promotion policies.

As a member of the DfE, you will be entitled to join the highly competitive Civil Service Pension Scheme, which many experts agree is one of the most generous in the UK.

You will have 25 days leave, increasing by 1 day every year to a maximum of 30 days after five years’ service. In addition, all staff receive the King’s Birthday privilege holiday and 8 days’ bank and public holidays.

We offer flexible working arrangements, such as job sharing, term-time working, flexi-time and compressed hours.

Most DfE employees will be working a hybrid pattern, spending at least 60% of their time in an office or work setting. Changes to these working arrangements are available in exceptional circumstances but must be agreed with the line manager and in line with the requirements of the role.

Travel to your primary office location will not be paid for by DfE, but costs for travel to an office which is not your main location will be covered.

Part‑time hours may be available, this will be considered by the hiring manager on a case-by-case basis, dependant on business need.

As an organisation, which exists to support education and lifelong learning, we offer our staff excellent professional development opportunities.

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window) , and will assess your Behaviours and Experience.

Application/sift:

To apply for this role, you will be asked to provide:

• A CV with full employment history, giving details of key achievements relevant to the skills and experience outlined in this job description. When giving details of your employment history, you should therefore include details of the work and projects that you have been involved in, and your role therein.
• A personal statement (maximum 1250 words) outlining how you meet the essential criteria as detailed in the person specification section of the advert. Please adhere to this word count as anything over 1250 words will not be considered.

Your CV and statement will be assessed together against the listed essential criteria.

Interview:

Those successful at sift will be invited to attend an interview of an hour and thirty minutes. Interviews will be on MS teams, with the candidate at a DfE office.

As part of the interview, you will be given an example of a project which will include code, and you will be asked questions about this, assessing your experience in line with the essential criteria. We will also ask further experience questions assessing the essential criteria and a question around the listed behaviour.

The coding exercise and experience questions together will be used to assess your experience against the essential (and in the case of a tie, the desirable) criteria.

Feedback

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview.

Timing

We expect to sift in week commencing 2 November 2026.

Interviews will likely take place in the weeks commencing 9,16 and 23 November 2026.

Once a provisional offer has been made, you will be invited to participate in a capability assessment to determine the value of the CBP allowance we can offer you. The assessment compares your skills against the advertised role described in DfE’s local Software Development Capability Framework, which is based on the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework .

Subject to your availability, we will aim to conduct the capability assessment and confirm the allowance offer to you within a week of the provisional offer being made.

This is a discretionary non-consolidated, non-pensionable allowance which, if awarded, is attached to the post. The value of the allowance is based on the outcome of a capability assessment and is reviewed annually. Allowance values range up to £20,750, with the highest values reserved for candidates whose capability is above the expected level for all of the skills.

Other Information

Interviews may be via Microsoft teams or face to face; the vacancy manager will confirm prior to the Interview.

In your application, please don’t include personal information that identifies you.

This means we can recruit based on your knowledge and skills, and not background, gender or ethnicity - it's called name blind recruitment (opens in a new window).

Please ensure that you remove from your application, all references to your:

• name/title
• educational institutions
• age
• gender
• email address
• postal address
• phone number
• nationality/immigration status

We reserve the right to raise the minimum pass mark in the event of a high volume or strong field of candidates.

Please be aware that this role can only be worked in the UK from the location options provided and not from overseas.

The government is committed to supporting apprenticeships, enabling people to learn and progress in a role whilst earning. We want to monitor the number of people who have completed apprenticeships who are now applying to progress further in their career and are asking this question to all candidates, on all vacancies. You will be asked a question as part of the application process about any previous apprenticeships you have completed. Your response to this question will not affect your application and it is not a requirement of the role to have completed a previous apprenticeship.

If successful and transferring from another Government Department a criminal record check maybe carried out.

In order to process applications without delay, we will be sending a Criminal Record Check to Disclosure and Barring Service on your behalf. However, we recognise in exceptional circumstance some candidates will want to sen