Lead Developer, Software Architect, DevOps

Fixed Term, 12 months

Full Time, 37 hours per week

£60,724 to £71,440 per annum

Location:

Chelmsford

Closing Date: 25th October 2026

Please note that visa sponsorship is not available for this role. Applicants must have a current, unrestricted right to work in the UK.

Essex County Council is delivering an ambitious transformation to become a leading digital council by 2030, with excellent customer service enabled through modern technology and service design.

The Lead Developer is a newly created role within Essex Digital Service, established to define and deliver the Council’s development strategy, build internal engineering capability, and enable scalable delivery in support of the Resident Experience Programme. Working on a range of transformational projects, the successful candidate will play a key role in improving how residents interact with the Council while shaping the future direction of the Council’s digital services.

The postholder will provide technical leadership across product teams, setting the technical direction for the Council’s new low-code platform and ensuring software solutions are designed and delivered securely, sustainably, and in line with user needs, organisational priorities, and long-term platform strategy.

As a senior technical leader, the Lead Developer will influence wider digital and technology investment decisions through technical assurance and strategic advice, supporting the Assistant Director for Product & Delivery with technical investment decisions and budgetary responsibilities of up to £500,000.

The role will directly manage a team of developers and be responsible for building and strengthening engineering capability across Essex Digital Service. With significant influence across major transformation programmes, the postholder will help shape council-wide engineering standards, practices, and technical capability.

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Corporate Services

• Develop and deliver the Essex Digital Service development strategy, aligning engineering capabilities with product, platform and architectural priorities to enable the delivery of secure and user-centred digital services.
• Establish and maintain engineering standards, design patterns and ways of working to promote consistency, enable reuse of common components, and accelerate the adoption of platform-based delivery approaches.
• Provide technical leadership across strategic programmes in order to ensure that solutions are scalable, sustainable and aligned to organisational outcomes.
• Lead the design, development and continuous improvement of software, services, APIs and integrations in order to deliver reliable, high-performing and maintainable digital products.
• Collaborate with Product and Delivery Managers to align engineering decisions with user needs, service priorities and measurable programme outcomes
• Lead, mentor and develop engineering teams to build capability, foster professional growth and create a high-performing engineering culture.
• Set and assure coding, testing, accessibility and service quality standards to improve delivery confidence, reduce technical debt and ensure compliance.
• Drive the adoption of modern engineering practices, including Dev Ops, CI/CD, automation and cloud‑native approaches, to increase delivery speed, quality and resilience.
• Identify, manage and mitigate technical risks while working with internal stakeholders and suppliers to deliver secure, coherent and cost‑effective digital solutions.

• Degree‑level qualification, or equivalent professional experience, supported by evidence of continuous professional development and demonstrated capability aligned to SFIA Level 6 software…