Software Developer

Where: UK flexible - office space available in major UK cities, but remote-ok. Occasional (~once per quarter) national travel to Leeds office for hackathons, team events etc.

Hours: Full time, 37.5h a week

Full Time Salary: £39,891.91 starting salary; guaranteed increments annually up to £46,683.60 in this band (Based on full time hours, pro rata for part time hours).

Contract Type: 12 Months Fixed term 

Why Change Grow Live?

Change Grow Live are a health and social care charity. We support people in a huge range of difficult situations, including those who use drugs and alcohol, and those whose home life is affected by drugs, mental health and/or domestic violence. We're the largest charity of this type in the country, supporting tens of thousands of people in their own journeys. Hundreds of staff work across our organisation to support some of the most vulnerable people in society. Among the many services we offer are:

• Needle exchanges, both in-person and anonymous
• Screening for blood-borne viruses
• Drug testing for fentanyl, nitazene and other harmful additives
• Prescribing safer alternatives to opioids to reduce harm from street drugs
• Working with local pharmacies to check people have picked up life-saving medication
• Case workers who specialise in helping children and young people

Our technology

We've got complex needs: recording, monitoring and reviewing information about our clients, with their informed consent. Our in-house web application acts as an electronic patient record, a case management system, a quality management system, and more - it's grown over the last 15 years!

We started out with a Perl application, and have improved it aggressively over the years. All our software is deployed using Docker containers using ECS; much of it using infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform and Pulumi. Our data is stored in a serverless/autoscaling MySQL database.

Newer work is often written in TypeScript, using NestJS and SvelteKit. We’ll use a variety of testing tools in both languages: end-to-end, integration and unit testing are all covered.

We practice a genuinely blame-free culture with incidents/mistakes and always focus our conversations on improving processes, not individual recrimination.

We're looking for compassionate, bold, open-minded software developers to help us build this software. Your efforts will empower frontline professionals carry out their life-saving work.

About you!

An ideal candidate will have some familiarity with SQL: our team write queries often!

We’d love to see candidates with some strong knowledge of HTML and CSS beyond the basics. We don't need you to know any frameworks in particular - but we'd love to see great fundamentals for building on the web, so you should have some experience building applications using JavaScript in the browser.

Debugging and testing experience is a must, in any language - we think that's a highly transferrable skill.

Previous experience with Perl is not a strict requirement. We're happy to show you the ropes - you'll be up to speed in no time!

You should really care about security. You’ll be happy to openly discuss approaches which make the software as safe as possible for people who use our services.

You’ll relish – or at least, enjoy the challenge of - diving into legacy code and documenting, improving and testing the code our users rely on. When you choose to rebuild things, it’s because you genuinely understand the previous solution and its shortcomings.

You'll be a curious, generalist thinker, never limiting yourself to one narrow specialty. As a team, we'll jump from CSS to AWS infrastructure in a day’s work. Of course, we don’t know everything: it's a perfect environment for learning; “I don’t know, let me check” is always a good answer.

What we will give to you: 

• 25 days holiday (+ bank holidays) rising by 1 day for each years’ service “Capped at 30 days” 

• Paid ‘Wellness’ hour each week along with a ‘Wellness’ hub and Employee Assist Programme 

• Contributory pension scheme 

• Several benefits incl. discounts for shopping, cinema, holidays, etc. 

• A friendly and supportive team 

• Training, career development & progression opportunities 

• Generous Refer-a-Friend Scheme 

Direct applications only — we will not be engaging agencies for this vacancy.

Please note: This role is not eligible for visa sponsorship. Applicants must already have the right to work in the UK at the time of application. For applicants with time-limited visas, unfortunately, we are unable to support new visa applications or extensions. More information about eligible roles and occupations can be found here: Skilled Worker visa: Overview - GOV.UK

We reserve the right to close the vacancy early if we receive a high number of applications, so we encourage you to apply as soon as possible.

Full-time hours at Change Grow Live are 37.5 hours per week. For part-time roles, the salary and payments will be pro rata based on contracted hours.