Senior Software Engineers

Location(s): Manchester, Greater Manchester or Samlesbury

Salary: £48,557 - £57,704, dependent on experience and including a basic salary and skills payment. Plus, you’ll receive a one-off recruitment bonus of £3,500 (£1,750 on arrival and £1,750 on successful completion of probation). There’s also the option to qualify for an increased skills payment of up to £19,113 once in-post, following a successful skills assessment.

Flexible Working: We recognise the importance of a healthy work-life balance and offer full-time, part-time, and compressed hours. While hybrid working can be more restricted, due to the nature of the work, some home working may be available depending on business needs. Find out more about flexible working on our website.

GCHQ is an intelligence, cyber and security agency with a mission to keep the UK safe. We use cutting-edge technology, ingenuity, and partnerships to identify, analyse and disrupt threats. Working with our intelligence partners MI5 and MI6, we protect the UK from terrorism, cyber-attacks, and espionage. At GCHQ you’ll do varied and fascinating work in a supportive and inclusive environment that puts the emphasis on teamwork.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll bring your experience of modern software frameworks and team leadership to our passionate tech community. You’ll help design new and existing systems, establish best working practices, and deliver high-quality solutions to mission-critical problems. With your expertise, you’ll operate at a deep technical level, leveraging your familiarity with languages such as C++, Golang, Java, JavaScript, .NET, Node, Python, Rust, and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).

You might be mentoring a team or leading as a technical expert. You’ll be keen to develop not just your own skills, but those of others. Whether you’re bringing new approaches, sharing innovative ways of working, or identifying new priorities, you’ll set the standard. You’ll engage with technical and non-technical customers and have a positive influence on the wider engineering community. With our encouragement to spend up to 30% of your time on development, innovation, and experimentation, you’ll have the freedom to explore new possibilities for yourself, and for GCHQ.

You don’t need to be a Software Engineer to apply; you might be working in Cloud Engineering and Security, UX, Site Reliability Engineering, Front-End Design, Agile, Solution Architecture, Data Engineering, or Machine Learning Operations. You’ll also have experience leading Agile project teams and evaluating customer business requirements.

Upon joining, you’ll have access to a wide range of learning resources from online courses, conferences and opportunities to pursue formal qualifications (funded by us). We’ll provide all the support you need for a rewarding career, whether that’s through tailored training or flexible working options. In this role, we offer full-time, part-time and compressed hours, meaning you can enjoy a great work-life balance without compromising on what matters to you.

At GCHQ, diversity and inclusion are critical to our mission. To protect the UK, we need a truly diverse workforce that reflects the society we serve. This includes diversity in every sense of the word: those with different backgrounds, ages, ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, ways of thinking, and those with disabilities or neurodivergent conditions. We therefore welcome and encourage applications from everyone, including those from groups that are under-represented in our workforce, such as women, those from an ethnic minority background, people with disabilities, and those from low socio-economic backgrounds. Find out more about our culture, working environment, and diversity on our website.

To find out more and apply, please visit our website.

To be eligible to apply, you must be a British Citizen. If you hold dual nationality, of which one component is British, you will nonetheless be considered. Candidates must normally have been resident in the UK for seven out of the last ten years. This is particularly important if you were born outside the UK. You can apply at the age of 17 years, if successful, you will not be offered a start date prior to your 18th birthday. Full eligibility details can be found on our website.

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Senior Software Engineers