Can you engineer CDS’s software dev community?
The digital government and civic tech communities talk a lot about how to make government more effective at delivering life-changing services. Things like agile practices, design thinking, and using modern technology are commonplace. At the Canadian Digital Service (CDS), we believe in the value of putting “people first,” which is why hiring the right person is critical, and more important than these processes and tools.
As you might expect from an organization with “digital” in its name, the Software Development Community plays a key role in helping CDS deliver on its mandate and to do this successfully, it’s critical that this team works well. To that end, we’re looking for a great person to be our Head of Software Development to help advance work on CDS products and make this community even better at what they do.
The job posting (also in French) says it best, but in short, we need this person to be amazing at:
- Supporting people and helping them grow
- Defining what the community owns and how it operates
- Curating best practices for software developers to accomplish CDS’s mission and build cloud-native web applications; and,
- Providing software development advice and moderating decisions using their experience
As someone working here, I can say that this is not going to be an easy job. CDS has wide-ranging challenges that sometimes include whiplash-y startup culture and large amounts of government change resistance. To boot, we need someone who is an excellent manager, not just a great engineer. The Dev Community carries a lot of our organization’s weight, and mentoring this community is vital to our success.
This is an organization that has the potential to help deliver critical services that millions of Canadians use and need every day. While there is a lot of challenging work ahead of us, it’s also deeply fulfilling to create teams and products that help people in need.
Is that you? Apply now.