At a Glance
- Tasks: Prototype and build digital tools for social innovation projects.
- Company: Nesta, the UK's leading innovation agency for social good.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, health plans, flexible working, and professional growth opportunities.
- Other info: Diverse and inclusive workplace with excellent career advancement potential.
- Why this job: Make a real impact by developing solutions for society's biggest challenges.
- Qualifications: Experience in full-stack development and collaborative team work.
The predicted salary is between 58500 - 58500 £ per year.
We are recruiting for a Creative Technologist / Creative Full-Stack Developer (Permanent role and 12 month Fixed Term contract).
About Nesta
We are Nesta, the UK’s innovation agency for social good. We design, test and scale solutions to society’s biggest problems. Our three missions are to give every child a fair start, help people live healthy lives, and create a sustainable future where the economy works for both people and the planet. For over 20 years, we have worked to support, encourage and inspire innovation.
How will a Creative Technologist contribute to Nesta’s success?
As a Creative Technologist you will prototype and build digital tools and products in service of Nesta’s innovation missions and goals. The things you will help build will range from full-stack web applications; functional prototypes for user testing; and beyond. This role will suit someone with real-world experience of working in small multidisciplinary teams to rapidly build and maintain prototypes or early stage digital products/MVPs across the full-stack, often using established frameworks (like Ruby on Rails or Django/Python) and existing tech where it makes sense.
The ideal candidate would be highly collaborative, outcome-focused and self-driven with the ability to take an idea or brief and simply and quickly turn it into a functional prototype or product alongside non-technical colleagues. It’s also very possible you will have skills beyond software engineering (e.g. arts, design, product, etc) or have developed your own digital products, and are more interested in quickly and simply delivering valuable digital products than tackling the most challenging engineering problems.
The role includes:
- Building software in service of our social innovation missions (A Fairer Start, A Healthy Life, and A Sustainable Future).
- Making regular hands-on software development contributions independently or as part of a multidisciplinary team.
- Turning ambiguous concepts or ideas into tangible functional or semi-functional software prototypes or products.
- Deploying and maintaining the digital products and tools you help build.
- Writing clean, secure and well-tested code, following best practice guidelines.
- Working with non-technical colleagues/partners to scope opportunities for software solutions.
- Contributing to the activities of multidisciplinary teams beyond programming.
- Exploring new tools and technologies pragmatically.
- Working with Nesta’s ‘Discovery’ function to identify, assess and prototype promising technology-based ideas.
The person should have:
Essential:- Experience of working in small teams or individually to rapidly build and release full-stack digital products.
- Comfort with core web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
- Ability to quickly learn new languages and frameworks.
- Familiarity with good design and usability principles.
- Experience of rapidly developing and releasing early-stage digital products and prototypes.
- Ability to identify, locate and fix faults.
- Understanding of information security and designing solutions with security controls embedded.
- A track record of designing and delivering simple working solutions.
- Experience integrating different technologies.
- A focus on building software that meets user needs.
- Experience presenting technical concepts and collaborating effectively.
- Experience developing your own digital products with a social impact purpose.
- Experience building data products and systems with AI features.
- Experience commissioning and overseeing tech-related work.
What we offer:
- Salary: circa £58,500 plus array of benefits.
- Location: Blackfriars, Central London - hybrid working arrangement.
- Term: Permanent and 12-month Fixed Term Contract.
- Hours: Full-time role with flexible working arrangements.
- Reports to: Product Lead.
At Nesta, we believe that a diverse workforce leads to an organization that is more innovative and creative. We actively seek to reach a diverse pool of candidates and are happy to consider any reasonable adjustments that potential employees may need to be successful.
We recognise the importance of a good balance between work and home life, so we do everything we can to accommodate flexible working arrangements.
