Provision of Remote Agile Application Development Services

Description

CERN intends to place several contracts for the provision of remote agile application development services. The Services currently support a contractor workforce of approximately one hundred professionals across a variety of technical and functional profiles. The Services shall include: software design and development, application maintenance and support, systems integration, quality assurance and testing, user experience and business analysis, deployment and operational support activities, user support, technical consultancy related to software engineering and application architecture. The present Market Survey will be followed by the issue of an Invitation to Tender to qualified and selected Firms and Group of Firms in August 2026 for contracts to start in Q1 2027 for a duration of five years. The future Invitation to Tender will be adjudicated on a best-value-for-money basis. To request the technical specification and market survey documents, please contact Sara Fletcher (Sara.fletcher@stfc.ukri.org) of the Science, Technology and Facilities Council (STFC). STFC are acting as UK liasions for the purchasing organisation, CERN. Lot 1: The Services will primarily be delivered using CERN-provided infrastructure, platforms, tools and services. Depending on the nature of the work, the Contractor's personnel may be provided with CERN-managed accounts, repositories, development environments, collaboration tools, software licences and hosting platforms. The technical environment primarily consists of web applications and services based on modern software engineering technologies and practices, including: • web applications based on Java technologies, mainly using the Spring framework; • React and TypeScript-based front-end applications; • Python-based data engineering, workflow orchestration and scheduling using Apache Airflow; • Oracle databases; • GitLab for CI/CD automation; • Docker, Kubernetes, Helm and ArgoCD for containerised infrastructure and deployment automation; • Sentry, Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring and observability; • Microsoft Power BI for reporting and data visualisation. While the majority of the Services are expected to be delivered within the technical environment described above, CERN also maintains and evolves a number of complementary applications, platforms and services using other technologies. Contractors may therefore be required to provide expertise in additional technologies, including Windows architecture expertise, Python, Go, C#, Flask, or Vue.js. Additional information: This procurement/requirement is wholly owned by CERN, with STFC seeking to signpost the opportunity to UK based suppliers. UK HMG retains no involvement, oversight or engagement in the procurement, and are acting to signpost to CERN/STFC from FTS and/or other centralised digital platforms only. UK HMG has no further information to share and will not respond to any further questions or engagements relating to the potential procurement. In all instances, Sara Fletcher (sara.fletcher@stfc.ac.uk) should be contacted for further detail.