• READING
• Permanent
• GBP 60,000.00 to GBP 65,000.00
• Senior
• IT, Development & Engineering role within the Computer Software / SaaS industry

Job Description:

The company is looking to hire Team Leaders to work in our R&D team based in their Reading office. The role is 70% hands on development so you will need to be a talented developer (either Java or C++). The other 30% will be the day to day running of your team, mentoring and developing their skills as well as carrying out appraisals. Their teams are usually around six or seven people strong, ranging from Senior Developer through to Associates.

The company

They are passionate about delivering innovative and quality solutions to real customer problems. They work with a wide range of customers including some of the world’s largest government departments, large defence organisations and well known financial and legal organisations.

They strive to hire positive and energetic people who want to make a difference to their products. They promote autonomy and ownership to enable people and teams to make their own collaborative decisions and to choose the best way to tackle challenges. They encourage an environment of continuous improvement in practices and self-development.

Their stack

They are a Java house, with C++ being the second most used language. They also use Python, C# and Ruby for smaller projects. They use Subversion and GitHub (with less of the former and more of the latter every day). They use Swagger/OpenAPI to define our RESTful API’s and implement them using Spring Boot. They build and deploy using Gradle, Jenkins and Nexus. Static analysis is done using SonarQube and Coverty, Unit Testing is covered with JUnit and Mockito. They test them BDD style using Cucumber.

Their UI is created in JSP, with some GWT, but they are currently evaluating a move to using Angular, React or Vue. Our products are built on RedHat Enterprise Linux.

They have a strategy aimed at optimising the variety of technologies that we use, maximising the use of open source solutions such as Postfix, PostgreSQL, Apache Traffic Server and ActiveMQ, while actively contributing back to the community. They are big fans of continuous integration and continuous deployment & use Jenkins, Chef and GitHub to help them with that.

How they work

They use Scrum and Kanban, with a few techniques borrowed from Less. This allows them to create flexibility and variety of work for everyone on the team. Their sprints last two weeks and finish with a demo or mini talk about what they achieved. They constantly optimise their processes to enable the team to focus on what they do best – solving real customer problems using code.

Every member of the team is given, and proactively encouraged to use, ten innovation days per year to learn about, or work on, anything they want that is related to their career. Their team use these days to achieve a wide range of things, from fixing bugs in product and development environments, learning new skills and technologies or coming up with truly innovative ideas and prototypes that later become part of their products.

Technical lunches take place regularly and feature an abundance of ideas and knowledge sharing, along with tons of pizza!

Key Responsibilities

• Perform technical duties and deliveries alongside the team (~90%)

• The team leader is a contributor and shares in the tasks required to achieve team goals

• Guiding, coaching and motivating a team of engineers (~10%)

• Management for a team of engineers, responsible for improvements and well-being.

• Working with R&D to improve processes and adopting best practices

• Involve the whole team in reviewing successes and identifying issues to innovate process solutions and align with departmental best practices

• Actively encourage and support cross team collaboration

• Making activities visible, encouraging teams to collaborate towards common goals and providing excellent “customer service”

• Supporting and mentoring engineers

• Responsible for supporting the team as a whole and mentoring less experienced engineers

• Recruiting new team members

• Determine required skill-sets to complement the team and drive recruitment activities

• Performing appraisals and identifying skills development opportunities

• Leadership is not power, but empowering and encouraging ownership and desire to improve

Skills Profile

• Mentoring and coaching skills

• Clear and concise communication skills (verbal and written)

• Presentation and collaboration skills

• Ability to drive improvements in an evolving technical environment

• Expertise in software development techniques (TDD, BDD, CI etc.)

• Understands Agile principles, Scrum framework and the SDLC

Personal Characteristics

• Creates a customer-centric, creative and enjoyable team environment

• Actively earns the trust and respect of others, leading by example and taking ownership

• Highly proactive, enthusiastic and transparent

• Develops high quality reliable software applications

• Innovative individual who inspires and encourages creativity in others

• Ensures that team members are following R&D best practices and procedures

• Assists in optimising the delivery effectiveness of the team

• Forms excellent cooperative relationships

Role Specific Skills

Essential

• Strong Java and/or C++ developer

• Proactive management of stakeholders, priorities and dependencies

• Successful deliveries of complex enterprise solutions based on Linux/Java

• Demonstrable Object Oriented programming experience

• Experience of writing unit tests and test driven development

• Experience of agile methodologies e.g. Scrum

• Clear and concise communication skills (verbal and written)

• Ability to lead effective project planning and prioritisation sessions

• Ability to inspire and motivate others

• Ability to adapt to a changing technical environment

Desirable

• Proven experience of leading a successful team

• Hiring, mentoring, appraising and developing

• Software architect with experience designing enterprise applications

• User Interface design and development

• Database design (RDBMS, SQL)

• Distributed systems using a JMS Compliant Message Broker such as ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ etc

• Java Database Access Layer (JdbcTemplate & Hibernate)

• Spring framework

• C# and .NET

• C++/STL/Boost

• Google Test/Google Mock

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS

• Experience of working with Business Intelligence tools

• Experience of successful Patent creation, application and submission

Education and Qualifications

• Degree or equivalent

• 3+ years experience in delivering commercial software

Job Type: Permanent

Salary: £60,000.00 to £65,000.00 /year

Application Questions

You have requested that Indeed ask candidates the following questions:

• How many years of agile methodologies e.g. Scrum experience do you have?
• How many years of deliver complex enterprise solutions based on Linux/Ja experience do you have?
• How many years of delivering commercial software experience do you have?
• How many years of leading a successful team experience do you have?
• How many years of Strong Java and/or C++ developer experience do you have?
• What is the highest level of education you have completed?
• Are you in Reading?
• Do you have the following licence or certification: legal to work in the UK?
• Do you speak Proficient English (Must)?