Senior Software Engineer (Technical Exploitation) - Stratford

About the job

Discover what it's like to work in a compliance role that makes an impact. Could you help us shape a stronger, fairer future? Your next career move starts here. Fraud Investigation Service (FIS) provides HMRC with an effective investigation arm to enforce the Department's compliance policies. This enables the Department to deliver against the strategic responsibilities across all the taxes and duties it administers. This includes complex offshore evasion, international smuggling of illicit excise goods, exports of controlled weapons and technology, labour market abuses, VAT and Self-Assessment repayment frauds and a host of other fraud attacks targeted at the tax system.

The Technical Exploitation Development (TXD) team plays an integral role in His Majesty's Government's fight against serious and organised crime, supporting investigations totalling hundreds of millions of pounds each year. The team manages a diverse and rapidly increasing product portfolio, ranging from development of covert tools for mobile device data acquisition, computer and network exploitation, building custom radio frequency hardware, to the implementation of cutting-edge data visualisation platforms. Collaboration and capability sharing are critical to our mission so working alongside other Government and Law Enforcement agencies will ensure that no two projects nor two days are ever the same in this role.

The role is ideal for experienced developers and engineers who enjoy problem solving and are driven to overcome complex technical challenges to produce solutions that enhance our sensitive capabilities. You will be expected to:

• Carry out research and development of new equipment, tools and techniques to counter the threat, risk and harm posed by serious organised criminals.
• Work in a team of software engineers and exploit developers, ensuring services are built, tested, delivered, and operated as required.
• Lead on the rapid development of user-driven prototypes to identify technical options and inform architectural approaches.
• Ensure systems are robust, scalable, open and secure to deliver a high-quality digital user experience.
• Follow best practice guidelines and seek to improve those guidelines.
• Work with your team to provide estimates on user stories/task/requirements.
• Collaborate as part of a team to design components for larger systems.
• Provide guidance, technical operational support and training in the installation and use of developed tools and techniques for deployment by investigation officers.
• Work as part of a skilled team sharing ideas, but also take the initiative and work independently with little supervision.
• Ensure all work is carried out within the requirements of the legal framework to be compliant in the law enforcement and legislative process.
• Provide direction and participate in code review, pair programming and mentoring to support junior engineers.
• Break a problem down into its component parts to identify and diagnose root causes as well as troubleshoot and identify problems across different technology capabilities.
• Build relationships and collaborate with external law enforcement agencies, private industry and academia.
• Communicate complex technical problems to stakeholders with clear communication that's understood by all.
• Demonstrate an awareness of information security and the types of security controls that can be used to mitigate security threats within solutions and services.

Essential Criteria

• Successfully develop computer software and have experience of the software development lifecycle.
• Identifying user requirements, ability to design software, write secure code and implement testing methods.
• Working as part of an agile software delivery team, leading on aspects of development work, providing guidance and setting development direction for more junior members of a team.
• Continuous integration (integration and unit testing).
• Using and maintaining source code version repositories using Git.
• Working with tools for API, performance, accessibility and security testing.
• Experience in one or more of the following languages: Python, Java, Go, Rust, C, Objective-C, HTML5, JavaScript, React, Vue.js, Node.js, TypeScript.
• Experience in at least one of the following technologies: Mobile application development: Android, iOS; Virtualisation: Docker, VMWare, Proxmox; Automation and testing: Ansible, Chef, Jenkins, Terraform; Logging and Visualisation: Elastic, Kafka, Spark, Graylog, Splunk; Reverse Engineering: Correlium, IDA Pro, Ghidra; Common exploitation/pen testing open source tools; Digital Forensics and Cyber Security tools.

Desirable Criteria

• Have academic and industry qualifications that evidence your ability, expertise and credibility, such as a degree in software engineering, cyber security, digital forensics or related subject, and/or industry qualifications like GIAC (e.g. GAWN, GREM, GCIH, GCTI), OSCP, OCWP, etc.
• Knowledge, understanding and practical application of the following legislation: Investigatory Powers Act (IPA 2016), Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA 2000) and the associated Codes of Practices.

Flexibility