Person specification
About you
You are an enthusiastic and organised individual who is keen to join a growing team and make a positive contribution. You have the confidence to advise and support our users as they send us increasingly complex digital records. You are delivery focussed 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 The National Archives business strategy, Archives for Everyone.
About the role
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.
You will be leading software development in our Digital Preservation team within the Digital Archiving department.
Your work 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 workflows constructed predominantly in Scala, Java, XSLT and XML Schema running in a Linux environment and we expect Cloud services to play a large role in our future architecture.
As a lead developer you will need to be experienced in balancing your time communicating with other teams and focusing on our Digital Preservation systems. You will influence future designs 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 Java and/or Scala and familiarity with AWS and Linux would be an advantage.
You will be thinking about the future impact of technology decisions. You will shape the team and its direction by prioritising work in response to emerging user needs, communicating the trade-offs. You will support developers and non-developers to collaborate, work in the open and follow best practice. You will be responsible for mentoring other developers in their practice and presenting results of your team’s work to others.
SC-level Security Clearance or willingness to obtain SC clearance is mandatory for this role and requires that you have lived in the UK for the last 3 years. The length of required residency may depend on individual circumstances. Please clearly state if you meet this requirement.