The National Archives is looking for developers of varying levels of experience and expertise across a number of roles. During the application process, we will take your skills and experience and any preference you express on-board and aim to match you to an appropriate level, service and team. The possible roles available are:
- Software Developer (Grade HEO)
- Senior Developer (Grade SEO)
Responsibilities
About you
You are an enthusiastic and organised individual who is keen to join a growing team and make a positive a contribution. You have the confidence to advise and support our users as they send us increasingly complex digital records. You are delivery focused and strongly motivated to provide an excellent service. As part of the Digital Archiving team, you will directly contribute to growing the digital archive and delivering the aims of TNA’s business strategy, Archives for Everyone.
We are committed to continually improving the diversity of our workforce and therefore encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQI+ community, the trans community, those who are neuro diverse, and those with a disability.
About the role
We’re currently looking for enthusiastic developers to join our growing digital preservation team. In this role, you will work as part of a multi-disciplinary team, to deliver products that will secure The National Archives ever growing digital collections.
The National Archives is building a suite of innovative digital products and services to ease the flow of digital records into the archive, preserve them for generations to come and open up access to this nationally important resource for audiences including students, government, researchers and the public.
In these varied and challenging roles, you will create, develop and enhance these innovative and high-profile services, ensuring that they are capable of handling the latest digital records as diverse new record formats are transferred to the archives for permanent preservation and access. You will have the opportunity to work on new initiatives, some of them using AWS, as well as working on the development of live services. We are a recognized research organisation, and you may also have the opportunity to contribute to our programme of technical research in digital archiving, and to talk about your work at conferences and meetings.
You should be passionate about technology and information management, and your own skills development. Your creativity and experience will be essential to the organisation to inform and shape the design and development of new processes and services. You will be motivated to find solutions to complex problems and will frequently look for opportunities to do things better. You will liaise with Heads of Department, technical staff throughout the Digital Directorate, and colleagues across The National Archives and beyond; the role will be varied and challenging.
Our new services will build on our award-winning Digital Records Infrastructure (DRI) which securely stores our rapidly increasing digital collection, operating at petabyte-scale to ensure the long-term preservation of vital public records. Government websites, the records of significant public inquiries, the decisions of senior officials, ministers and prime ministers and the nation’s digitised history from the 11th to the early 21st century are all to be preserved in the system. We currently operate a series of batch-processing workflows constructed predominantly in Scala, Java, XSLT and XML Schema running in a Linux environment.
You will influence the future design of the system and will be responsible for helping to set technical direction, mentoring staff, undertaking code review as well as writing high quality, robust code yourself. You will be an expert in one or more programming languages, with a good level of knowledge of others; familiarity with Linux would also be an advantage.
You will have a passion for learning and developing your skills and will thrive in an environment which values and supports continuous learning.