Developer, SocietyWorks - Fully Remote

SocietyWorks is the commercial division of the UK civic technology charity, mySociety, the organisation behind well used services such as FixMyStreet, WhatDoTheyKnow, TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem. We’re a unique not-for-profit group providing  services to both citizens and public sector organisations which are used by over 30 million people annually and have been deployed in over 40 countries worldwide. We build and deploy effective digital solutions to remove barriers to democratic participation, and to help public sector clients better serve citizens.

Our friendly, high-performing agile team works remotely from a mixture of home and co-working spaces. We meet up regularly in teams, and as an organisation, in cities across the UK. 

We’re looking for Python developers with a willingness to learn Perl to join us and help to develop and support the rollout of our digital services for local authorities and other public sector clients. 

Our developers are self-motivated and driven to meet our client and user needs, contributing to our commercial and wider public benefit mission objectives. While this is a technical role, our developers also have strong communication and collaboration skills with the ability to translate technical information to a non-technical audience. 

This role is a good match for you if you’re motivated by our goals, interested in working across a range of projects, able to context switch across development and maintenance tasks, and have experience programming in Python and a willingness to learn Perl on the job to expand your existing skill set.

No recruiters or agencies, please.

What does the role involve?

Objectives

• Contribute to the development and continual enhancement of SocietyWorks’ products and services by developing and delivering appropriate features to a high standard
• Develop your own and colleagues’ skills through feedback, code review, pair programming and collaborative design sessions
• Grow and maintain awareness of internal systems and technical trends in order to make good judgements about which problems to tackle and how
• Provide excellent client facing support including cross team liaison to deal with complex issues
• Collaborate with non-technical team members to deliver cross organisation goals, for example through giving demos to prospective clients (online or in person) or contributing to blog posts to support our sales and marketing growth strategies, as well as supporting our account and delivery managers with technical knowledge to interpret and respond to relevant client requests such as quotes 

Responsibilities

Developers have both coding and communication responsibilities:

• Work with colleagues on technical and functional design of features, identifying problems with requirements
• Produce clean, efficient code that meets our development standards
• Understand how our codebases work, at both high and low levels
• Work with clients and partners to establish and document their needs
• Test, deploy and debug programs and systems
• Identify maintenance, security, bugs, fixes and improvements that could be made to existing software
• Support clients and partners in ongoing use of our services
• Work with the team to develop and refine roadmaps
• Prioritise workload effectively
• Create technical documentation
• Join the on-call rota (while out of hours call outs are rare, our client SLAs require that we have 24/7 support for business critical issues)
• Support non technical colleagues when developer input is required

Requirements

We think this position would suit you best if you have some or all of the following:

• Proficient programming experience in Python in a professional environment. Experience in Perl is a bonus.
• Experience in working with databases (such as PostgreSQL or MySQL)
• Experience with version control, preferably Git and GitHub
• Willingness to gain deep understanding of our work
• The ability to write clean, maintainable HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• The ability to write and maintain test suites
• Experience of collaborating with others on web development projects; it would be a bonus if that was client-facing work
• Experience with the wider infrastructure surrounding busy web services, such as  linux servers, load balancers, caches and similar systems would be an advantage.

And we’d love to hear from you if you are:

• Keen and able to learn
• Friendly and motivated
• Comfortable working within an agile, multidisciplinary team environment
• A thoughtful and clear communicator
• Analytical, with a problem-solving approach
• Able to work in a responsible and self-directed manner, within a broader team
• Good at managing your own time and avoiding distractions
• Aware and realistic about your own strengths and weaknesses

Got questions? Drop an email to Yolanda Gomes on recruitment2026@mysociety.org.

This is a permanent contract with a salary in the range of £42,000 to £52,000 per year, plus pension (4% employer, 4% employee).

You must be based in the UK and you need to have the right to work in this country (sorry, but we can’t offer help with visas or relocation expenses).

You can read more about what it’s like working at mySociety at https://www.mysociety.org/about/careers/culture/

We want you to enjoy being a part of the mySociety team,  so we’ll do everything we can to support you in making your job work for you. We’re always willing to discuss flexible hours or co-working spaces. Wherever you are in the UK, and however you want to work, we’ll do our best to make sure you have everything you need to do your job well. 

Deadlines and dates

The application deadline is 31 May 2026 and interviews will take place over the following few weeks via video conference. We will aim to notify applicants of whether or not they will be invited to interview by mid June. 

Application instructions

Your application should consist of a CV and covering letter. We’ll rely on your covering letter to show us why your skills make you a good fit for this role when we are shortlisting candidates, so take your time getting it right. 

We are particularly interested in improving the diversity of our team and we welcome applications from all suitably skilled and experienced people, and particularly from candidates with Black, Asian or other Minority Ethnic heritage, in line with our EDI strategy. 

We are monitoring our recruitment processes to ensure we are doing everything we can to encourage applications from people of all backgrounds. We would ask you to please complete our optional equalities monitoring form. The information you share in the form will be anonymous and will not influence the assessment of your application.

We will shortlist all applications anonymously. So please use your initials rather than your name on your CV and cover letter, and don’t include identifying details such as your name or email addresses on these attached documents.