Job vacancy: Principal Developer, NHS Business Services Authority, Newcastle Upon Tyne

Job summary

Main area: Principal Developer
Grade: NHS AfC: Band 8a
Contract: Permanent
Hours: Full time - 37.5 hours per week
Job ref: 914-BSA4554

Employer: NHS Business Services Authority
Employer type: NHS
Site: Stella House
Town: Newcastle Upon Tyne
Salary: £50,952 - £57,349 per annum
Salary period: Yearly
Closing: 06/05/2024 23:59

Principal Developer

NHS AfC: Band 8a

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

In this role, you are accountable for:

Software development leadership

1. Provide in-depth expertise, for consultation across all areas of DDaT, in designated technical specialisms, and software development practices. See appendix I for details.

2. Support multiple development teams across a set of services to achieve efficient delivery of quality outcomes.

3. Define, document and socialise NHSBSA software development standards, design patterns, methods and tools. Ensure they are applied effectively and are iterated to provide continuous improvement.

4. Review specifications and solution designs, to ensure consistency, selection of appropriate technology, efficient use of resources and integration with multiple systems and technologies. Provide feedback on functional and non-functional requirements to ensure the overall needs of the business are met within software delivery.

5. Act as an escalation point for technical issues arising across the project delivery lifecycle. Apply experience and collaboration skills to find appropriate solutions, coordinating with professionals from within and outside of the project team as necessary.

6. Identify programme level risks within software development across multiple services and raise through appropriate channels.

7. Identify, prioritise and lead the strategic implementation of risk mitigations, improvements and efficiencies, ensuring that the organisation derives maximum value across multiple services.

8. Manage the assurance of software development activities across a range of project including internally developed, 3rd party partnerships and fully outsourced. Develop appropriate measures and processes to provide sufficient insight into project delivery health. Identify trends and anomalies, reporting at agreed frequency on development needs and deviations from standards.

9. Lead the Developer Community of Practice, being accountable for developers aligned to your designated technical specialisms.

Knowledge management

10. Take an active, lead role in your professional development. Keep up to date with the latest technologies and software development standards and best practice, through self-directed and NHSBSA organised learning activities.

11. Identify, investigate and champion the application of emerging technologies and approaches within software development.

12. Create workable prototypes using a variety of methods and tools to meet business and user needs.

13. Identify and support opportunities for teams to develop their skills to meet the changing needs of the business. Take ownership for decision making within your area, seeking support and feedback to develop well thought out solutions, processes and work as required, and in conjunction with agreed procedures.

Relationship management

14. Foster relationships and partnership, to identify and deliver value to the organisation.

15. Collaborate across multiple disciplines to achieve strategic aims, ensuring consistent approaches, methods, standards, and patterns are holistically applied:

a. User Centred Design

b. Architecture

c. Security

d. Data

e. Test

f. Platform

g. Support

h. Commercials

i. Finance

16. Work with Team Managers to identify, implement and support team and individual development, career progression, performance management, providing mentorship and guidance for other software developers.

17. Consult with wider UK Government departments and agencies, and industry to define and achieve strategic aims.

18. Deputise for the Head of Software Engineering as required.

Information management

19. Maintain the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information systems through compliance with relevant legislation and regulations and that controls and management strategies are designed and implemented to support this.

Delivery management

20. Manage workload complete to a high quality and within agreed timelines. Deliver continuous improvements to enhance own and business areas; co-ordinate delivery of work across multiple strands such as continuous improvement, project related work, and operational tasks, escalating issues at appropriate times.

21. Prepare plans to enable the delivery and management of projects and programmes undertaken by the professional leadership team. Provide strategic and operational direction in the preparation of plans to deliver systems and services across DDaT and the organisation.

22. Manage and implement approaches strategies, standards, practices and policies across the software development profession, ensuring and monitoring the timely delivery of business objectives within budget.

23. Proactively identify warning signs of significant delivery challenges and provide a decisive response.

24. Contribute to and lead procurement processes for hardware, software and outsourced capability. Review functional and non-functional requirements to ensure the overall needs of the business are met from a DDaT perspective.

Financial management

25. Contribute to budget management processes in accordance with NHSBSA’s policies, standing orders, financial regulations and legislative requirements.

26. Contribute to and prepare proposals for change, including producing necessary estimates, mandates and business cases.

27. Monitor budget spend and resource estimates against projects and change initiatives.

Staff management

28. The general management of activities and standards of staff within professional disciplines across multidisciplinary teams.

29. Enable the performance of others, including objectives setting fully aligned to departmental and organisational objectives and goals, and the development and motivation of staff to achieve them.

30. Mentor staff and advise on career paths to encourage pro-active development of skills and capabilities.

31. Conduct meaningful appraisals and 1-1s, identifying and meeting development needs, implementing, monitoring, evaluating and reporting on the impact and success of training plans.

32. Receive and act upon and where possible resolve a range of escalations including staffing, disciplinary procedures, resourcing business and technical, to secure

satisfactory outcomes. Where unable to resolve, provide sufficient detail, escalate to the appropriate levels within the organisations, within agreed policies, procedures and processes to ensure appropriate resolution.

33. Undertake recruitment and selection in line with organisational processes. Participate in the implementation and delivery of initiatives to secure suitable resources, increase skill levels and develop talent pools to meet the changing needs of the business landscape.

34. Provide feedback to support and encourage teams and individuals to develop thinking and independently work through issues, to reach solutions-based outcomes. Lead by example by seeking, providing and implementing individual feedback to improve ways of working and own performance.

In addition to the above accountabilities, as post holder you are expected to

Undertake additional duties and responsibilities in line with the overall purpose of your role and as agreed by your line manager.

Demonstrate NHSBSA values and core capabilities in all aspects of your work.

Foster an environment where your own and colleagues’ safety and well-being is promoted.

Contribute to a culture which values diversity and inclusion.

Comply with NHSBSA policies, procedures, and protocols as they apply to your role.

Working relationships

Responsible to: Head of Software Engineering

Responsible for:
· Lead Developers
· Developers
· Junior Developers
· Apprentice Developers

Key relationships and connections:

1. Heads of Profession
a. Software Engineering
b. Architecture
c. User Centred Design

2. Professional Leadership
a. Principal Developers
b. Professional Lead for Test
c. Professional Lead for Design
d. Professional Lead for User Research

3. Team Managers

4. Delivery Managers

5. Architecture (Enterprise, Data, Solution, Technical)

6. Security (Information Security, Information Governance, Cyber Security)

7. Platform Engineering

8. Live Support & Operations

9. IT Service Management

10. Governance, Risk & Compliance

11. Commercials

12. Finance

What do we offer? 

27 days leave (increasing with length of service) plus 8 bank holidays 
Flexible working  
Hybrid working model (we are currently working largely remotely) 
Career development 
Active wellbeing and inclusion networks 
Excellent pension (20.6% employer contribution)
NHS Car lease scheme

Person specification

Qualifications

Essential criteria

Level 6 equivalent qualification in IT (e.g. BSc Computing OR
Relevant experience of the subject matter

Desirable criteria

Level 7 equivalent qualification in IT (e.g. MSc Computing)

Experience

Essential criteria

Ongoing Continuous Professional Development.
Leadership of a technical community of practice.
Development lead of large-scale, cloud hosted, web-based solutions.
Work in agile development teams, with experience of scrum lifecycle, ceremonies and concepts such as user stories
Open source and cloud technologies.
Use a strategic approach to optimise software development practices.
Identify functional and non-functional requirements and ensure they are analysed and implemented as part of a project.
Author of software development standards, policies and supporting guidance
Stakeholder engagement across a wide range of professions and business functions, building relationships to support delivery of user and business needs.
Present to large audiences with effective communication techniques.
Oversight of development activities across multiple delivery teams.
Applying technical knowledge and experience to create or design workable prototypes.
Creating and implementing a quality assurance process across the software development discipline.
Mentoring and leading a community of practice of developers.

Desirable criteria

Applying Government and/or NHS Service Standards to deliver solutions to meet user needs, with particular emphasis on: a. protecting users’ confidentiality and privacy, b. choosing the right tools and technology, c. coding in the open, d. using/contributing to open standards, common components and patterns, e. operating a reliable service, f. ensuring clinical safety, g. focus on interoperability.
Business change, rationalisation and transformation
System administration and configuration management skills.
Interaction with a range of external, third-party suppliers
Use of common agile supportive tooling such as Jira, Confluence, Miro

Personal Qualities, Knowledge and Skills

Essential criteria

Expert in writing clean and maintainable, tested, production ready code in one of the NHSBSA core languages and frameworks.
Expert in developing for at least one architectural tie.
Expert in at least one key NHSBSA non-functional requirement.
Expert in at least one NHSBSA cloud platform.
Expert in version control (Git), CI/CD build and release strategies.
Expert in 3rd line application support covering problem diagnosis within complex systems, and appraising remediation options and determining the most appropriate action.
Practitioner in Agile software delivery.
Working knowledge of change management.
Working knowledge of requirements capture and analysis.

Desirable criteria

Practitioner in assurance of software development projects.
Practitioner in risk management covering identify, define, assess and treat stages.
Working knowledge of requirements capture and product selection.
Awareness of commercial procurement processes and frameworks.

The NHSBSA is passionate about creating a diverse and inclusive organisation, which is a great place to work and truly reflects the diversity of our customers. We welcome applications from talented people of diverse characteristics including age, disability, gender identity and expression, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, sexual orientation, or any marginalised group. We also welcome applications from all those in the Armed Forces Community.

At the NHSBSA we pride ourselves on being a Disability Confident Leader, Stonewall Top 100 employer and we’ve recently been awarded the Employers Network for Equality and Inclusion Gold Standard benchmark.

We offer an invitation to the first stage of the selection process for people with disabilities that wish to be considered under the Disability Confident scheme, and for members of the Armed Forces Community, where all of the essential criteria in the person specification are met.

Certificate of Sponsorship

Applications from job seekers who require current Skilled worker sponsorship to work in the UK are welcome and will be considered alongside all other applications. For further information visit the UK Visas and Immigration website (Opens in a new tab).

From 6 April 2017, skilled worker applicants, applying for entry clearance into the UK, have had to present a criminal record certificate from each country they have resided continuously or cumulatively for 12 months or more in the past 10 years. Adult dependants (over 18 years old) are also subject to this requirement. Guidance can be found here Criminal records checks for overseas applicants (Opens in a new tab).

A copy of our Privacy Notice is available to view at the link below:

NHSBSA Privacy Notice