Digital roles at The National Archives

Digital roles at The National Archives

Join us on our journey to develop the future and safeguard our nation’s past.

View our current vacancies – or view example job descriptions:

• Senior Back End Developer Python
• Senior Developer (Scala – Java)
• Software Developer
• User Researcher
• Interaction Designer

Read testimonials from our staff

How to apply for jobs in the Civil Service

The National Archives is looking for talent to fill a range of exciting digital, data and technology roles. If you want to get to the heart of what our users need, find a role that allows your creativity and skill to shine, or empower colleagues to deliver high-quality services, then we want to hear from you.

About our digital teams and how we work

We have a varied remit – we are five departments that create, manage and maintain:

• The National Archives’ website which includes the catalogue of our holdings
• The government web archive
• The digital archive (including services for faster transfer of records, digital preservation and access for our users)
• The online catalogue and taxonomy
• The legislation service and The Gazette

We are committed to creating high-quality, user-focused digital products and services. We have adopted Agile working practices and are now growing our digital capability to build multi-disciplinary, agile product teams.

This is a great time to join us as we prepare to take on a fresh set of challenges, including:

• reviewing our current web estate with a view to making it more user-focused and intuitive
• creating a search that will help our users find what they want quickly
• building fast, easy and secure services for sending digital records to the archive
• increasing the capacity and capability of our world-leading digital preservation service
• opening up new routes for access to our digital public records and data
• working with the billions of digital objects in our web archive

We have strong in-house digital teams who design, build and support most of our digital services. We offer a supportive environment where our people can develop and thrive. Additionally, some services are delivered by external partners or through a commercial off-the-shelf model where we integrate our workflows and data with commercial products.

We are keen to harness new technologies. We use a diverse set of technologies across our digital products. These do, or will in the near future, include:

• Unix platforms with significant open source technology stacks
• Microsoft Server/SQL Server and associated application development tools
• Django
• Wagtail
• Cloud platforms
• RDF, NoSQL and graph databases

The National Archives has a strong research focus and we encourage and support our staff to excel in their chosen field, speak about their work and submit papers to conferences or journals. Many of our roles offer opportunities for collaborative research and development with industry specialists and academic partners.

Find out more about what we do

Read about some of our work on our Medium blog.

Have a look at our GitHub repositories.