A Message from 10 Downing Street
Assembling an elite team of engineers, developers and data scientists to rewire the state.
Dear SoTA,
Within No10 we are building a new elite team of engineers, developers and data scientists to help us fundamentally rewire the state. We want members of this community to join it.
You don’t need any experience in government, in fact we are recruiting exclusively from industry and academia. New people, new energy, new ideas.
We don’t care about credentialism or what’s on your CV. Nor will we be asking you for competency statements. We will instead test your technical skills, quality of your code, how you solve problems and communicate complex ideas to powerful but time-poor and non-technical stakeholders.
Our recruitment process has a success rate of well under 1%, but if this job is for you then you will find the process fun.
For those that make it through we can guarantee you the most impactful work of your career and support and guidance from the existing No10 Data Science team. You will be protected as much as possible from bureaucracy and given the tools and support you need to deliver your mission.
We are offering salaries up to £200k and contracts or secondments between 6-18 months, with the potential to extend. If you want, we’ll negotiate a secondment with your employer. If you’ve never considered working in government before then this is your chance to do a tour of duty at the very heart of it and see how it goes.
If successful, your work will generally fall into some of the below categories and you can expect to work on many different projects over the course of your stint:
Ensure the most important decisions are informed by the best possible evidence.
Transform No10 and key areas of the government system through the applications of data science and AI. Making it smarter, faster more effective and efficient.
Radically improve the quality of public facing services that people use every day.
Identify and deliver projects that further our policy priorities from strengthening the NHS to making the streets safer and accelerating the delivery of new infrastructure and houses.
If this sounds like you then you can simply send us a one page CV via the link on our website.
And, given our interest in maths and reasoning skills, feel free to have a crack at our puzzle below and include your answer in the email along with your CV.
Answering the question is purely optional!
Question:
Ben and Lily play a game where they alternate picking pairs of numbers (A, B) where A and B are integers between 1 and 12. On his go Ben picks a pair, whereas Lily gets to pick two pairs on each of her goes. However, the two pairs she picks must be in one of these forms:
(A,B), (A,B+1)
(A,B), (A,B-1)
(A,B), (A+1,B)
(A,B), (A-1,B)
Any given pair (A,B) may only be picked once, and once one player has picked it the other player may not pick it. They keep playing until one player cannot go.
If Lily plays well, how many pairs of numbers can she end up with, regardless of how Ben plays?
Send your answer and a one page CV to Fellows@no10.gov.uk.