The closing date for this job has now passed.

Job reference: 015675
Salary: Band 7 (£39,300 - £46,006)
Job closing date: 17/11/2020
Job Type: Administrative Services
Location: Westport 102, Edinburgh
Employment type: Permanent
Hours Per Week: 37.5
Job posted date: 03/02/2020
Employer (NHS Board): NHS Education for Scotland
Department: NDS

Job Advert

How would it feel to help transform health and social care for millions ?

We are continuing to interview and hire during COVID-19

Our recruitment process is now 100% remote and if successful you would work remotely, only working from our offices once guidance from Scottish Government supports this


NDS (NES Digital Service) is a fast-growing team within NHS Scotland applying a lean start-up approach to build and scale a new digital platform and services helping improve health & social care for millions across Scotland. 

As a Software Engineer you would be joining NDS at an exciting time in a cloud first environment working with a modern tech stack alongside a fast growing and diverse range of colleagues from highly regarded peers including Skyscanner, NCR, Travelnest, and JP Morgan.

You could directly be improving eyecare, cancer treatment, remote consultations (and more..).

Developing services for everyone across Scotland means Diversity and inclusion is front of mind in ensuring these are safe, respectful, secure, inclusive, well-designed and surprisingly good.

And we deliver Quickly..

For example, in 10 days we designed, built and launched a service for those shielding during COVID lockdown – in 10 days.  This ensured they had access to regular food parcel deliveries and priority supermarket delivery slots.


If you were in this role today here's some of the things you may be doing… 

  • Demoing a new feature on the eyecare service you had helped build to colleagues at our regular showcase 

  • Designing, deploying, and managing your own infrastructure on AWS using tools including Kubernetes and Kibana 

  • Introducing a new team member to the monitoring and alerting solutions used by all our teams.  Improving the documentation to cover some additional points based on the questions they asked  

  • Walking the dogs over lunchtime to enjoy the fresh air and come back to work fresh 

  • Interviewing a promising engineering candidate who had a great design interview.  Maybe they could be joining soon? 

  • Discovery work on security changes which would be required in adding a proposed new feature to the Eyecare service 

  • Helped in planning a smooth onboarding experience for a new team member joining next week 

  • Sharing an interesting blog with your team about how small changes can help to promote healthy and productive remote working 

  • Reviewing a colleague’s code then spending time with them to improve your knowledge of React 

  • Encouraging weekly 1:1 with your line manager with great progress being made against your personal goals 

  • Contributing to the design and development of the National Digital Platform.  All our Product teams work plays a key part in evolving this 

  • Speaking with doctors for their feedback on the latest version of a service you are building together.  Documenting and feeding this back to the development team at the next sprint retro 

  • Contributing to an engineering design session for a potential new service intended to help improve cancer care   

  • Thanking Service Design colleagues who have been invaluable in helping to understand the pathways and deliverables needed for this service 

  • Identifying a solution to improve cloud costs and presenting this at the engineering team meeting 


We can offer you…

Life-work balance - with opportunities for flexible working and remote working 

A collaborative, open, and empowering environment.    

Modern Tech Stack 

Work with a broad range of technologies and development processes to build cloud-hosted products including node.js, React, Postgres, Java, Docker, Kubernetes 

Extensive Benefits 

Generous NHS pension scheme 
Annual incremental salary increase (up to the maximum of the salary band) plus annual NHS salary scale review  
Annual Leave – 27 Days increasing in line with service plus 8 days public holiday 
NHS discounts and more 


Your Role 
As a Software Engineer you will play a key role in delivering valuable solutions to complex problems across health and social care.   

Your responsibilities will include but are not restricted to…  

  • Ensuring Products and web services they develop meet the team's standards of security, reliability, cost effectiveness and scalability 

  • Applying an iterative approach to development ensuring continual improvement and learning 

  • Participating in team planning  


What we love to see… 

  • Experience delivering and operating software solutions in a complex environment 

  • Version control (e.g. git), continuous integration, continuous deployment, unit testing, and test-driven development 

  • Practical and/or theoretical knowledge of using cloud platforms (e.g. Azure, AWS, Google Cloud) and tools like Kubernetes, Docker to design, build, and deploy functioning systems in the cloud 

  • Agile methodologies and continuous improvement of development processes 

  • Programming Languages 

  • We welcome applications from candidates regardless of their core programming languages.  While not essential experience developing with any of node.js, java, React would be a bonus 

For further information please refer to the attached Job Information Pack. 

For Assistance

Please contact:  matthew.hill@nes.scot.nhs.uk

Take a look around the company https://jobs.scot.nhs.uk/