Lead Software Engineer

Job description

About [Employer hidden]

Our aim at [Employer hidden] is to use human-centred technology to improve our society. We believe putting people at the heart of designing, building and delivering public services leads to better outcomes for everyone.

Are you a Software Engineer that wants to actually see the real-world impact from what you help to create? Our mission is simple! We believe we can use tech to make public services better. We also believe this can happen best when our own team represents the society that actually used the services we work on. At [Employer hidden], we’re collectively continuing to grow a culture that is happy, healthy, safe and inspiring for people of all backgrounds and experiences, so we encourage all people from underrepresented groups to apply for roles with us. Have we caught your interest? Please read on…

We are looking for Lead Engineers with a particular penchant and love for cloud, automation, slick tooling, and empowering software delivery by coaching teams in true DevOps fashion. While we are looking for those with significant experience working with AWS this role remains a full stack and polyglot role as with all of our Software Engineering roles

Our Lead Software Engineers are Tech Leads, Architects, Thought Leaders, Full Stack Engineers, and Consultants. They are our most senior technologist within a customer account representing [Employer hidden] and act as a hands-on CTO across one or more software delivery teams driving organisational change and outcomes for users. They combine technical excellence, drive to deliver, and coaching, to achieve outcomes for our customers and their users, and to establish strong engineering cultures within our customers' organisations. They find themselves working on a variety of different problems from monoliths to microservices, upskilling colleagues and customers, always finding themselves learning from others, while constantly striving to be nice humans

Key responsibilities

We primarily write and deliver custom software for the public sector. We work across central and local government, as well as in health, and our past lies in the technology startup world. Technical excellence for us isn’t about delivering to feature lists. We place a strong emphasis on outcome-based delivery; ensuring our customers goals are understood and achieved with the technology we deploy.

High performing  software delivery teams need to be empowered to iteratively and rapidly deliver changes all the way through to production. To do this we combine our extensive cloud automation knowledge with DevOps culture.

We ensure we document our architecture and infrastructure as code, using technologies such as Terraform and OpenAPI. Containerisation is a big part of empowering our teams to develop, deploy and scale their applications, but so too is using AWS Lambda and avoiding the complexity of stateful services altogether. Right tool for the job.

For us, DevOps is about culture rather than roles and titles. Even though this role is for someone with strong DevOps experience, the biggest impact you will have is coaching and helping teams use the platforms you build. You won’t be building infrastructure in isolation or charged with deploying other people’s work into production. You’ll empower teams with the mantra: you build it, you run it!

Our teams have used Java, Ruby, Python, ES6 with React, C# with .NET Core. We don’t limit ourselves as a company and we expect all our Engineers to be keen on learning new technologies. Automation is important to our teams, so we make sure there is a CD pipeline set up to build, test, and release many times per day.

We grow a team of language agnostic engineers, which you might already consider yourself to be, who are versed in a mix of paradigms such as object oriented, functional, declarative, event-based and aspect-oriented. To create this environment our Senior Engineers need to embrace sharing their knowledge and skills with others, and they need to keep an open mind -we’d love to hear some examples of mentoring, coaching and growing team members. Maybe you will have written some blog posts about your discipline, or perhaps even delivered a talk or two.

Skills, knowledge and expertise

Essential Skills

We want our teams and individuals to grow. If you don’t have the following skills, you will have access to a learning budget, experienced team members and a wider learning and mentoring culture that can help you develop the following:

• Written code with tests
• Delivery in an agile environment
• Worked across a variety of programming languages
• Worked with databases
• Worked with APIs
• Worked with at least one Cloud platform
• Debugging experience in a range of systems
• Evidence of self-development - we value keen learners
• Drive to deliver outcomes for users
• Desire to mentor & people manage

Nice to Haves

• Consultancy experience
• Working directly with customers and users
• Working within multidisciplinary teams with product, design, and technology working within the same cycles
• Showcasing and presentation skills
• Agile practices such as Scrum, XP, and/or Kanban
• Pair programming - we pair around 50% of the time
• Writing code with test-driven development
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines
• Component-based design techniques such as using pattern libraries, styled-components, CSS-in-JS, BEM, and/or SUIT CSS
• Debugging infrastructure
• The REACT ecosystem including a test-driven approach
• Infrastructure as code technology like Terraform and Cloud Formation
• Familiarity with architectural and design patterns
• Use of architectural design records

You can find the full job description on our handbook here

Please note, an increasing number of our customers are specifying a minimum of SC (security check) clearance in order to work on their projects. As a result, we're looking for all successful candidates for this role to have eligibility.

Eligibility for SC requires 5 years' continuous UK residency and 5 year's employment history (or back to full-time education). Please note that if at any point during the interview process it is apparent that you may not be eligible for SC, we won't be able to progress your application and we will contact you to let you know why.

Job benefits

At this point, we hope you're feeling excited about [Employer hidden] and the job opportunity. Even if you don't feel that you meet every single requirement, we still encourage you to apply. Get in touch with our talent team if you’d like an informal chat about the role and your suitability before applying. We are hiring for this role directly, so will not respond to any CVs sent via external recruitment agencies.

Support in applying

If you need this job description in another format, or other support in applying, please email [contact hidden].

We believe we can use tech to make public services better. We also believe this can happen best when our own team represents the society that actually uses the services we work on. We’re collectively continuing to grow a culture that is happy, healthy, safe and inspiring for people of all backgrounds and experiences, so we encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply for roles with us.

When you apply, we’ll put you in touch with a member of our talent team who can help with any needs or adjustments we may need to make to help with your application. We’ve put together this blog as a resource to share more about reasonable adjustments and some examples of what this could include. We also welcome any feedback on how we can improve the experience for future candidates.

Life at [Employer hidden]

We’re committed to building a happy, inclusive and diverse workforce. You can get a sense of what it’s like working here from our blog, where we talk about mental health, communities of practice and neurodiversity (as well as our client work and best practice).

Like many organisations, we use Slack to foster a sense of community and connection. As well as special interest groups such as music, food and pets, we also have 10+ Slack channels dedicated to specific communities, allies, and identities as well as dedicated learning spaces called communities of practice (COPs). If you’d like to speak to someone from one of these groups about their experience as an employee, please do let a member of the [Employer hidden] talent team know.

Benefits

We are always listening to our growing teams and evolving the benefits available to our people. As we scale, as do our benefits and we are scaling quickly. We've recently introduced a flexible benefit platform which includes a Smart Tech scheme, Cycle to work scheme, and an individual benefits allowance which you can invest in a Health care cash plan or Pension plan. We’re also big on connection and have an optional social and wellbeing calendar of events for all employees to join should they choose to.

Here are some of our most popular benefits listed below:

30 days Holiday - we offer 30 days of paid annual leave plus bank holidays

Flexible Working Hours - we are flexible with what hours you work

Flexible Parental Leave - we offer flexible parental leave options

Remote Working - we offer part time remote working for all our staff

Paid counselling - we offer paid counselling as well as financial and legal advice

Location:

Any UK Office Hub (Bristol / London / Manchester / Swansea)

Department:

Technology > Software Engineering

Employment type:

Permanent

Workplace type:

Hybrid

Compensation:

£70,000 - £90,000 / year

Sounds good?

Join us in our mission to use technology to improve society for everyone.

Apply for this position

How we hire

Our hiring process is designed to be thorough, transparent, and supportive, guiding candidates through each step. The exact process may vary slightly depending on the role but these are the typical steps candidates can expect.

We’ll keep you updated throughout the process and provide helpful feedback at each stage. No matter the outcome, we make sure the feedback is useful and supportive, so you feel informed and can learn from the experience.

1. Application reviewed

Our talent team will review all applications, and while we may use AI to help speed up the process, a real human will always make the final decisions. Once reviewed, shortlisted applicants will be invited to a screening.

2. Talent Partner screen

This is a 25-30 minute call with someone in our talent team who is hiring for the role.

3. CV Hiring Manager shortlist

Once screenings have taken place the hiring manager will review the shortlist and invites to interview will be sent.

4. First stage interview

You may then be invited to an initial virtual interview which is usually with the hiring manager or a couple of members from the team. This is usually around 45 – 60 minutes and the format may vary depending on the role.

5. Final stage interview

If you progress, you’ll be invited to a final stage interview which is usually with two members of the team. The format varies depending on the role and this is usually an hour.

6. Final conversation (not applicable to every role)

Final conversation with one of our exec members.

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