Creative Technologist / Creative Full in England

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.

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

• Build software in service of our social innovation missions (A Fairer Start, A Healthy Life, and A Sustainable Future) and work closely with our practices (methodological experts in data science, design, experimentation, etc.) to identify and develop technological solutions or enhancements to achieve our mission goals.
• Make regular hands‑on software development contributions independently or as part of a multidisciplinary team to rapidly build digital tools and products that meet users and stakeholder needs in service of our mission goals; releasing the smallest and simplest working software quickly and often, in order to learn, deliver value and continually improve/iterate.
• Simply and quickly turn ambiguous concepts or ideas into tangible functional or semi-functional software prototypes or products to demonstrate their potential and help us learn.
• Deploy and maintain the digital products and tools you help build including finding ways to make improvements and resolving faults quickly so they don’t happen again.
• Write clean, secure and well-tested code, following best practice guidelines.
• Work with non-technical colleagues/partners from other disciplines to scope opportunities for software solutions, understand what needs to be built, and adapt plans and tasks in response to new learning or requirements.
• Contribute to the activities of multidisciplinary teams you are part of beyond programming, including but not limited to participating in user research and testing; co-designing solutions; as well as defining requirements and project planning.
• Regularly pick up and explore tools and technologies that are new to you, as well as being pragmatic about when to use the simplest option (e.g. no/low code tools; reuse existing tech or services; etc) to deliver value to users and stakeholders quickly.
• Work with Nesta’s ‘Discovery’ function to identify, assess and prototype the potential of promising, cutting‑edge technology-based ideas and approaches to help achieve Nesta’s missions.

The person

• Prototyping and product development: You have experience of rapidly developing and releasing early stage digital products and prototypes; then working iteratively with stakeholders and users to improve them.
• Service support: You can identify, locate and fix faults. And you can manage service components to ensure they meet business needs and performance targets.
• Information security: You can understand information security. You can design solutions and services with security controls embedded, specifically engineered with mitigation of security threats as a core feature.
• Systems design: You have a track record of designing and delivering the simplest working solution, keeping the architecture and technology choices of systems you design simple and proportionate to the maturity of the product and brief.
• Systems integration: You can integrate different technologies, balancing an appropriate mix of tried-and-tested with cutting‑edge, to quickly deliver scrappy proofs of concepts or robust products.
• User focus: You have a track record of building software that meets the needs of users and stakeholders.
• Communication and collaboration: You have experience presenting technical concepts and effectively collaborating to deliver valuable software products in a non-technical environment.

What we offer

• Salary: circa £58,500 plus array of benefits, including health cash plans, dental insurance, the ability to buy and sell annual leave, eyecare vouchers and more.
• Location: Blackfriars, Central London - hybrid working arrangement, with a minimum of two days working from the office.
• Term: Permanent and 12-month Fixed Term Contract.
• Hours: This is a full-time role but we offer a range of flexible working arrangements and encourage our people to take advantage of them.

Equal Opportunities

At Nesta, we believe that a diverse workforce leads to an organisation that is more innovative, more creative and gets better results. We want our workforce to represent the diversity of the people and communities we serve. We also want our workplace to be one where different experiences, expertise and perspectives are valued, and where everyone is encouraged to grow and develop.