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MI5 is responsible for protecting the UK from threats to our National Security. Our teams work tirelessly to ensure the safety and prosperity of our country, countering threats from terrorism and espionage. Whatever your role, you will contribute to our mission in keeping the country safe. We can’t tell you much about how we use technology, but we can tell you plenty about what it’s like to work with us.

Who we are

Engineering is the beating heart of MI5, developing and maintaining capabilities that support all aspects of our business. We use agile methodology to deliver products that are core to MI5’s operation, working to the full spectrum of investigative, analytical and corporate areas of the organisation.

Our products are built across a variety of different tech stacks, giving engineers access to a career where they can move between teams to build experience in a wide number of technologies or develop a deep specialism in their preferred area. Embracing a DevOps mindset, our teams run what we build. Whether it’s building a platform to enable the analysis of data, systems to track the progress of our investigations, compliance services to ensure we are operating legally or tooling to improve our developer experience, the nature of our work presents unique and fascinating engineering challenges, the likes of which you will never have seen before.

Our teams

We build products that provide capability aligned to the full range of MI5 business areas. Our multi-disciplinary product teams are made up of engineers who work alongside product owners, business analysts and agile delivery colleagues to ensure MI5 gets what it needs. The majority work in Scrum or Kanban. We have strong graduate and apprentice programmes that place our more junior staff alongside experienced engineers to support their development.

Our tech stacks vary between product, but most back end systems are built in Java or C#. We use technologies such as Oracle, Mongo, Elastic Search and Hadoop for data storage. On the front end we’re mostly JavaScript focused, employing frameworks such as React.js. We also make use of cloud technologies sun as AWS and Azure.

Who you are

We are looking for Software Engineers who have some experience of building systems as part of agile teams, working with Senior Engineers and Architects to help implement components features of a product. We’re interested in people who:

• Have some experience of programming in Java, C#, Python or JavaScript
• Are aware of good continuous integration and continuous delivery principles
• Constantly want to improve themselves and learn new things
• Enjoy communicating with technical and non-technical colleagues

What you’ll do

You’ll share our collective responsibility to keep the country safe and be keen to constantly improve yourself and your team. Our teams work closely with each other and with mission customers, so it’s important that you’re prepared to communicate and share your knowledge. As an associate engineer, you’ll be expected to:

• Take responsibility for implementing new features, working with senior engineers and others in the team to plan, build and test them
• Support products owned by the team, providing on-call if necessary, working with users to identify and fix defects
• Support and mentor junior colleagues, helping them to understand what great software engineering looks like
• Participate in guilds and cross-organisation initiatives to build our community of engineers
• Participate in agile ceremonies as per the team’s ways of working

Benefits

• Pension
• Interest free season ticket loan
• Cycle to work scheme
• Financial support for learning and development
• Subsidised Gym

Learning and development is central to our engineering ethos and we invest heavily in our staff. As part of your MI5 career we will support you in broadening and deepening your technical and non-technical skills. We have access to a wide variety of classroom and online learning, as well as our own development programmes and schemes. We work with external bodies such as the Institute for Engineering and Technology and the British Computing Society to support and fund accreditation for our staff, which could be in a specific technical area or more broadly, such as becoming a Chartered Engineer.