Lead Full Stack Developer

Available on a full time or part-time basis (39 hours or 32 hours per week/ 4-5 days)
Flexible working options include flexible start and finish times and some home working.
Starting salary: from £56,000 per annum FTE (depending on experience), plus benefits and bonus.
Based in Central London (Blackfriars) and Manchester. We use a hybrid model with 2 days per week minimum in the office.

Are you looking for a new challenge and want to join a successful and rapidly growing organisation? Do you have a passion for enabling people to perform at their best? If so, we want to hear from you.

We are looking for a Full Stack Developer to join our Data Science and Technology team at BIT. As a Full-Stack Developer at BIT, you will be responsible for the technical delivery of our digital products and client solutions, working closely with our Group Product Lead to ensure robust, scalable technology. You will play a crucial role in maintaining and enhancing Predictiv – our best in class online research platform – while also delivering product and software solutions for client-facing projects.

The role requires someone with strong full-stack development experience who can work effectively in multidisciplinary teams. In particular, a strong ability to understand the needs of different technical stakeholders like researchers and policy experts to develop and deliver creative technology solutions. You’ll be building and maintaining production-grade systems that handle real-world research and impact at scale.

About the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT)

Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) is a social purpose company. It exists to improve people’s lives and communities. It works in partnership with national, regional and local governments, businesses, foundations and charities, to tackle major policy problems, often through testing and implementing simple yet powerful changes.

It has 250 staff based in 8 countries across Europe, the Americas and Asia Pacific, and has run more than 1000 projects to date, including over 700 randomised controlled trials in dozens of countries. In addition to its own interventions, it openly shares expertise and helps others build capacity and skills to apply behavioural science for social good.

What does a Lead Full Stack Developer at BIT do?

• Predictiv Platform Development: Lead technical development and maintenance of Predictiv, our industry-best online research platform, ensuring we are consistently innovating and evolving in line with new capabilities and applications while remaining robust, scalable, and optimized for deployment with high performance and security standards.
• Research Platform Integration: Work closely with behavioural scientists and researchers to understand their technical needs and translate methodologies, solutions, and interventions into products.
• Production System Management: Work with group Dev Ops and Engineering teams to deploy, monitor, and maintain production-grade systems, implementing comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and automated testing to ensure system reliability and performance at scale.
• Technical Architecture: Design and implement scalable system architectures that can handle growing user bases and research demands, making technology choices that balance cutting-edge capabilities with stability and maintainability.
• Code Quality and Security: Write secure, well-tested, and maintainable code following industry best practices, implementing appropriate security controls and conducting code reviews.
• Technical Innovation: Evaluate and integrate new technologies and approaches that could enhance our research capabilities or improve system performance, balancing innovation with operational stability.
• Client Project Delivery: Work as part of multidisciplinary teams to deliver technical solutions for client engagements, rapidly building digital tools and prototypes that support behavioural research and policy interventions.
• Client-Facing Technical Work: Participate in client meetings and presentations when technical expertise is required, explaining complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and gathering technical requirements.

What makes a great Lead Stack Developer at BIT?

• Programming and build (software engineering). You have experience of working in small teams or individually to rapidly build and release full-stack digital products using multiple languages and frameworks, including full-stack web application frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Django for Python, and are comfortable with core web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You can quickly learn new languages and frameworks when needed and focus on using the best and simplest tool for the job, including no/low code tools where it makes sense. You are comfortable with Git and Github, and able to test, deploy and monitor software you build. As well as technical knowhow to make things that work you are familiar with good design and able to follow guidelines and specifications to build things that are usable and appealing to look at.
• Production Full-Stack Development: Experience building, deploying, and maintaining full-stack web applications in production environments. You’re comfortable with the entire technology stack from database design through to front-end implementation.
• Prototyping and product development. You have experience of rapidly developing and releasing (e.g. in a matter of days/weeks) early stage digital products and prototypes; then working iteratively with stakeholders and users to improve them. You can approach prototyping as a team activity, actively soliciting prototypes and testing with others. You can use a variety of prototyping methods and choose the most appropriate and are comfortable quickly putting together functional or semi-functional prototypes using tools and technologies that are new to you in order to learn, deliver value and continually improve/iterate.
• Scalable System Design: Proven experience designing and implementing systems that handle significant scale, including database optimization, caching strategies, load balancing, and performance monitoring. You understand the technical challenges of serving thousands of concurrent users.
• 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. You focus on ensuring a low complexity stack to enable small teams to rapidly release and maintain software iteratively. In collaboration with stakeholders you can select appropriate design standards, methods and tools, and ensure they are applied effectively. You can review the systems designs of others to ensure the selection of appropriate technology, efficient use of resources and integration of multiple systems and technology.
• 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; and you can establish and maintain appropriate levels of automated software testing to support this.
• User focus. You have a track record of building software that meets the needs of users and stakeholders. You can collaborate with other disciplines and can represent users internally. You can explain the difference between user needs and the desires of the user. You can champion user research to focus on all users. You can prioritise and define approaches to understand the user story, guiding others in doing so.
• Communication and collaboration. You have experience presenting technical concepts and effectively collaborating to deliver valuable software products in a non-technical environment. You are highly collaborative, outcome-focussed and self-driven with the ability to take an idea and make it real simply and quickly. You can act as a bridge between design and product mindsets, technical knowhow and non-technical colleagues.
• Tech for good: You are motivated by developing products that have public good and social impact at their heart – even though this comes with unique responsibilities and constraints!

In addition, we are particularly interested to hear from candidates who have:

• Experience building tools for research or data collection, understanding the unique requirements of handling research data, participant management, and survey/experiment platforms.
• Experience of commissioning and overseeing tech-related work.
• Background in building survey platforms, A/B testing tools, or data collection systems
• Knowledge of data visualization libraries and techniques
• Experience with machine learning or AI integration in web applications
• Previous experience in consulting or client-facing technical roles

Who are we and what can we offer you?

The Behavioural Insights Team is the world leader in applying behavioural science to public policy challenges in order to strengthen communities and improve lives.

We design and rigorously test new ideas across a range of areas such as health, crime and education, to establish what works and what doesn’t. We have helped Tuberculosis patients take their medicine; reduced police susceptibility to cyberattacks; and helped organisations close their gender pay gap.

BIT really is a great place to work:

• Bonus scheme
• Generous pension scheme with 7% employer contribution
• A flexible benefit pot of £1,100 to spend on our flexible benefits programme which currently includes things like the ability to buy extra annual leave at the start of the year, gym membership, cycle to work scheme etc or just take as cash.
• 25 days of annual leave (in addition to public holidays) for full-time employees, rising to 27 days after 2 years continuous service
• We offer enhanced parental leave payments
• We encourage flexible working and have a culture which enables this; for example flexible start and finish times and an IT set up which allows for easy working from home options
• We have regular team lunches with inspirational guest speakers.
• We’re a social bunch and have a variety of interest groups including Film Club, BIT Kids for our parents & 5-a-side team to name a few.
• We have a great office, which has a fabulous roof terrace overlooking the Thames river, an amazing coffee machine and fridges stocked full of soft drinks!

How to apply

We use a great platform called Applied to reduce bias in the recruitment process. You will need to answer a few work-based questions which will be anonymously marked by members of our team. Our selection is based on performance in these questions, as well as reviewing your CV to understand your experience.

Candidates with the top scoring answers will be invited to a structured interview where you get to meet some of the team. At the interview stage you will be asked questions that reflect the role and also to complete a work-based task, so you have the chance to demonstrate your skills. It’s at this stage we first see your CV. We always give all applicants feedback, no matter what stage your application reaches.

Please note:

You will need to have the right to work in the UK in order to be able to undertake this role. We will ask all applicants short-listed for an interview to provide evidence of their right to work during the recruitment process. If you do not have the right to work for BIT but are the most suitable person for the role we will explore with you whether sponsorship may be an option. However, this may not be possible for all roles.

Some of the personal data you provide to Applied when you apply for a role with The Behavioural Insights Team will be passed on to The Behavioural Insights Team for the purposes of (a) reviewing your application; (b) inviting you for interview; and/or (c) offering you a job and getting you set up as an employee/contractor. For full details on how BIT collects and uses your personal data please visit our website – https://www.bi.team/bit-global-recruitment-privacy-notice/

If your application is not successful, any personal data provided to us by Applied (including any personal data relating to equal opportunities monitoring as set out above) will be retained by The Behavioural Insights Team for no longer than 6 months after the application deadline has passed (other than in exceptional circumstances where we may need to retain your personal data for longer), at which point your personal data will be securely deleted. We only keep your information for that period in order to allow us to comply with relevant legal obligations.

Apply now