Joining us, you get to work for not just one high performing London Borough, but two.

Sutton and Kingston councils have a number of shared services serving both authorities, with some teams and roles more focussed on one Council than the other, but the majority are shared across both, meaning you get multiple opportunities to learn from a wider pool of activities and two different political bodies.

We work flexibly in both Sutton and Kingston offices, and support working at home or flexible working patterns that enable you to tailor your working life to everything else in your life. We provide the equipment and tools to enable you to work flexibly, and in return ask you to use that flexibility to be creative and ambitious in the services we deliver.

There are some really exciting things happening in both Sutton and Kingston. We are developing the London Cancer Hub, a world leading cancer research and treatment hub that will bring together professionals from across different sectors to identify and test new treatments and therapies. We are undertaking the largest housing regeneration programme ever delivered in Kingston, building new energy efficient housing that will transform some of our oldest Council owned housing. Both boroughs have publicly committed to doing what they can to tackle the climate emergency and are investing in new technologies and societal change that will help bring carbon emissions down and improve our climate impact.

We work flexibly in both Sutton and Kingston offices, providing the equipment and tools to support hybrid working patterns that enable your working life; in return we ask you to use this to be creative and ambitious in the services we deliver. You should choose Sutton and Kingston if you are looking for an opportunity that will challenge you to deliver more, support you to achieve personal ambitions, and expect you to put borough residents at the heart of what you do.

Sutton is a well connected attractive part of London that has a reputation for excellent schools, green and leafy open spaces, and a history that drives a thriving heritage and culture offer through our museums and libraries. The Council is controlled by a long established Liberal Democrat Administration and has high ambitions set out in its corporate plan “Ambitious for Sutton”, that will ensure Sutton remains a great place to live, work and raise a family. The Council plays a leading role in a number of local partnerships and places great emphasis on engaging effectively with its residents, listening to local voices and making their message heard across London Government.

Kingston is a beautiful Royal borough with a historic setting on the banks of the Thames with excellent schools and a bustling retail centre, all surrounded by open green spaces such as RIchmond Park and Bushey Park, former recreation grounds for Tudor kings and queens. The Council is controlled by a Liberal Democrat Administration and has a corporate plan “Making Kingston Better Together” that sets out a vision to be a vibrant, diverse and inclusive borough where residents are active, empowered, engaged and able to remain independent and resilient. The Council engages with residents through a number of forums and events through the year, and like Sutton plays a leading role in developing the South West Region of London.

We’re looking for people to help us design and design and build user-centred software through all phases of development.

In this role you will:

• Understand the whole system and take responsibility for it.
• Work with other disciplines to understand what needs to be built.
• Operate the production services you build.
• Find ways to improve system robustness, resilience and stability.
• Support the development community to succeed in their work by coaching and mentoring more junior colleagues.

About the work

In 2023 you will join a multidisciplinary team working to design and build one of the following:

• Website enhancements, involving the use of AWS to create a serverless API gateway for back office integration and the adoption of user-facing authentication.
• Adult social care's referral and triage service, starting with rapid prototyping through to build and rollout.
• Housing's property and letting management service, involving the integration of the system with multiple back office systems.
• Planning's check planning permission service, involving the deployment of open source code to AWS.
• Customer service's adoption of new contact channels and automation, including the implementation of chatbots and social chat services.

We're the Digital team for Kingston and Sutton councils. We are committed to delivering excellent public services to our residents and local businesses, which is why we place the user, and their needs, at the heart of our agile delivery strategy. We are proud of our digital culture, and have a team of excellent professionals working across multi-disciplinary teams to deliver new digital services.

We're growing our digital team to support transformation work in every service area of the councils. We're looking for people who can:

• help us put users at the centre of our services;
• investigate and design more effective ways of delivering our services;
• introduce new technologies and speed up our pace of delivery; or
• use data from our systems and sensors to inform our services.

This role would be suitable for a mid-level full stack developer looking to process their career.

Our ideal candidate will have the following:

• 
  Experience designing and building serverless applications with AWS.
• Experience designing and building automated deployment pipelines.
• Experience working in C# .Net, Java, Python, or Node.js.
• Experience working with HTML, CSS, JavaScript or TypeScript.
• Experience working with MS SQL Server and AWS database technologies.

To be successful in this role you must have:

• Experience playing a leading role in a multidisciplinary product team.
• Experience setting and following service and development standards.
• Experience developing services that take account of the needs of diverse users.
• Experience building complex services in code.
• Experience working in a culture of continuous code release.
• Significant experience working in teams using agile methods and culture.
• Significant experience in understanding and balancing client, organisational, and technical needs and knowing how to balance these when setting product strategy and direction.
• Significant experience researching, prototyping, launching and scaling products and platforms from inception to live.
• Experience working with APIs and microservices architecture and managing the relationships between interdependent product and platform teams.

Please see the job description for full details.

As an organisation that values and nurtures talent, we’re committed to helping you fulfil your potential and will offer you a supportive, friendly and collaborative environment to grow and develop your career and skills. We’re constantly striving to improve our ways of working so putting your ideas across however big or small; will be fully encouraged and supported by your colleagues and our dynamic and experienced management team.

In addition we offer a modern and flexible working environment for our staff supported by our IT infrastructure, Google Chromebooks and Google Apps, which have acted as a key enabler for collaborative and streamlined working. The COVID-19 pandemic has required us to be even more flexible in how we work and manage staff workloads, ensuring they have the correct equipment and resources to be able to maximise their talents and looking after their wellbeing.

Employees have access to a wide range of benefits, some of which include:

• Generous annual leave entitlement plus bank holidays (pro-rata if part-time working hours apply)
• Three volunteering days per year
• Flexible and agile working arrangements
• Comprehensive learning and development programme
• Discounts on a range of local shops, restaurants, gyms and leisure centres
• Interest free season ticket loans
• Local Government Pension Scheme
• Bicycle loan facilities and cycle to work scheme
• Zip car scheme
• Free eye tests and contribution towards glasses
• Confidential wellbeing and counselling support
• Subsidised gym membership

We pride ourselves on being a diverse, tolerant and welcoming Borough and we aim to create a workforce which reflects the community we serve. We are respectful of difference and realise the positive value of diversity in our workforce. We welcome and encourage job applications from people of all backgrounds and particularly welcome applications from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic candidates and disabled candidates as these groups are currently under-represented in our workforce.

We are proud to be recognised as a Disability Confident employer, and are committed to thinking differently about disability and taking action to improve how we recruit, retain and develop disabled people. We guarantee to interview all disabled applicants who meet the minimum/essential criteria for the role.

We offer a range of family friendly, inclusive employment policies, flexible working arrangements, staff engagement forums, and inclusive staff networks who help drive our diversity agenda.

We are an accredited London Living Wage Employer and this means that everyone working at the Royal Borough of Kingston, regardless of whether they are permanent employees or third-party contractors and suppliers receive the London Living Wage. The real Living Wage is higher than the government’s minimum, or National Living Wage, and is an independently calculated hourly rate of pay that is based on the actual cost of living.

The UK has introduced a new points-based immigration system affecting EU and Non-EU workers and sponsorship requirements. We advise checking the GOV.UK website for right to work guidance.