Senior Software Developer (Management) - Met Office - SEO

• We’re a force for good - focusing on our environmental and social impact
• We’re experts by nature - always learning and developing to do things better
• We live and breathe it - putting our purpose at the heart of decision-making
• We’re better together - understanding partnerships and inclusivity make us greater
• We keep evolving - pushing boundaries to make tomorrow better for our customers

Your Key Duties

As a Senior Software Developer – Management, you will be responsible for a team of dedicated software engineers and testers who create and maintain systems which bridge the gap between our front-end products and back-end science, ensuring that we are able to make the very best use of our ever-evolving supercomputer capability.

In Transport, our focus is on developing and operating services for the global aviation community as part of our responsibility as a World Area Forecast Centre (one of only two in the world).

In Defence, we deliver mission-critical digital services, data products, and environmental intelligence that supports Defence operations worldwide. Our work enables informed decision-making, helping military personnel operate effectively in complex and challenging environments. We empower our people to lead through technical excellence, ownership, and a shared commitment to delivering real-world impact.

You will lead and develop a high-performing team, providing clear direction, coaching, and support to enhance capability, engagement, and performance.

• Provide technical and team leadership across the development lifecycle, guiding, mentoring, and inspiring engineers to deliver high-quality, resilient services.
• Plan and lead development on sets of related stories.
• Have an understanding of the whole system and take responsibility for teaching this to others.
• Work with other disciplines to understand what needs to be built and operate the production services you build.
• Coach and mentor more junior colleagues.
• Find ways to improve system robustness, resilience, and stability.

Person Specification

Essential Criteria, Skills And Experience

• Team Leadership: Lead and support, including mentoring and coaching a geographically dispersed multi-disciplinary team. Represent your team and work with stakeholders to design and plan upcoming work and create an environment that empowers your team to deliver. Set and maintain team standards for engineering quality, security, and maintainability when solving complex problems. (We’re better together)
• Programming and build (software engineering): You can collaborate with others, when necessary, to review specifications. You can use the agreed specifications to design, code, test, and document programs or scripts of medium-to-high complexity, using modern standards and technologies including Java and Python. (We’re expert by nature)
• Systems Design, Integration and Service Support: You can design and review cost-efficient systems using design standards, methods, and tools, and ensure they are applied effectively. You can identify and articulate risks and their potential impacts. You can apply efficient use of resources and integration of multiple systems and technology. You can define the integration build and coordinate build activities across systems to undertake and support integration testing activities. You can identify, locate, and fix faults and design support processes for others to follow to keep services operational. (We live and breathe it)
• User focus: You can collaborate with user researchers and can represent users internally. You can explain the difference between user needs and the desires of the user. Champion user research to focus on all users. Prioritise and define approaches to understand the user story, guiding others in doing so. Offer recommendations on the best tools and methods to use.
• Information Security: You can understand information security and design solutions and services with security controls embedded, specifically engineered with mitigation of security threats as a core feature.