Senior Engineer - Digital Innovation in Hatfield

Department: Library and Computing Services / Digital Innovation Team

Full Time Equivalent: 1 FTE (37 hours per week)

Contract: Fixed term for 2 years

Salary: UH8 £46,049 pa to £58,225 pa by annual increments

Annual leave: 30 days plus standard public holidays and 4 days for office closure between Christmas and New Year

Location: College Lane Campus, Hatfield

Role Overview: You will lead meaningful change, designing and delivering digital services that directly support students, staff and the future of education. This hands‑on role will influence technical direction, work closely with stakeholders and drive improvements across a complex digital ecosystem. You will work with modern, emerging and open‑source technologies, evolving our platforms to be more scalable, resilient and user‑centred.

Main duties and responsibilities:

• Lead design, development and ongoing improvement of digital services and enterprise applications ensuring reliability, security and integration within the university’s digital ecosystem.
• Work closely with stakeholders to understand, prioritise and translate requirements into practical user‑centred solutions and oversee delivery through agile practices.
• Take ownership of key systems, manage performance and continuous improvement, contribute to project planning, procurement and service design.
• Mentor colleagues, promote engineering standards and drive continuous improvement across delivery processes and the wider organisation.

Skills and experience required:

• Substantial proven experience in developing and implementing robust digital applications in a large, networked environment.
• Experience applying testing and quality assurance practices including unit, integration and regression testing, ensuring high standards of software quality.
• Experience working with relational databases and designing integrations using APIs.
• Strong understanding of frontend interface design, usability, accessibility and user experience principles, ensuring solutions meet organisational and regulatory accessibility standards.
• Experience in software configuration and support covering access, permissions and security; user‑defined fields and lists of values; data validation and reconciliation; online processes and collaborative workflow; web portal functions; and business intelligence reporting.
• Good communication skills, ability to collaborate with a wide range of stakeholders, and to motivate the team through technical leadership, encouragement and constructive feedback.

Qualifications required: Degree or equivalent professional experience; qualification in computing at professional level or equivalent expertise and experience.

Contact: Thomas Swaddling – t.swaddling@herts.ac.uk – Digital Innovation Lead

Equal Opportunity: We are committed to equality, diversity and inclusion. We encourage applications from underrepresented groups, including people of Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, disabled people, LGBTQI+ people and women in grades UH7 and above.

Additional Information: An appointment to this role may require an Academic Technology Approval Scheme (ATAS) certificate. We regret that we are unable to offer UKVI sponsorship for this post; applicants will either hold UK Right to Work or demonstrate access to UK Right to Work before an offer is made. Internal applicants – please ensure you apply via your employee self‑service portal.

Closing Date: 03 June 2026