Junior Developer

Junior Developer | JavaScript, React, AI-First | Government-Backed Service Used by 1m+ People

• Salary: £32,500 - £40,000 + benefits
• Location: Hybrid, London – 3 days a week in the office
• Contract: 23-month fixed-term, 35 hours per week
• No visa sponsorship

Over a million people a year come to these digital services while dealing with something stressful and legally complicated, often at one of the harder moments in their lives. Your job is to make that experience clear, reliable and easy to use. You'll be joining a small internal engineering team inside a national public body that gives free, impartial legal advice to the public across England and Wales. They're building their own in-house engineering capability for the first time, and you'll be one of the first developers in it, working directly alongside the Technical Lead.
You'll write across the stack but lean towards the front end, turning designs and user needs into clean, accessible React interfaces with Python and Django behind them. You'll also help scope the work, so you need to be a strong communicator who can talk a problem through before writing code. The team works AI-first: coding assistants are part of the daily workflow, never a shortcut past understanding what you ship.
Non-Negotiables

• JavaScript and React (or a similar modern framework)
• Python (Django a strong plus)
• AI first development approach
• HTML and CSS (strong fundamentals, with an eye for detail)
• Git and collaborative version control
• Commercial software development experience (18 months or more)
• A strong communicator, comfortable scoping and talking through pieces of work

What You'll Work With

• Wagtail (Django-based CMS)
• PostgreSQL
• Docker
• RESTful APIs
• Accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA
• The GOV.UK Service Standard

Nice to Haves

• Figma, with an interest in interaction and user-experience design
• Accessibility testing and best practice
• Automated testing
• Experience in the public sector, a charity, or another purpose-driven organisation
• A degree in Computer Science or similar, or equivalent experience

Why Join
You'll build services that count, used by more than a million people a year who need clear help at a difficult time. You'll be mentored directly by an experienced senior engineer and given room to take on more ownership as you go, which is rare this early in a career. You'll have a real say in how a national service looks and works, from the front-end detail through to accessibility and the GOV.UK Service Standard. And you'll work in a proper AI-first setup, with modern tooling as standard rather than something you have to argue for.
Employee Benefits

• 10% non-contributory employer pension
• 27 days annual leave plus bank holidays
• 35-hour contract with flexi-working - sustainable productivity is valued over long hours
• Generous personal development budget and support for ongoing CPD

Junior Developer | JavaScript, React, AI-First | Government-Backed Service Used by 1m+ People