Team Leader Software Engineer

Location: Reading, UK

Salary: GBP55,000.00 Per Annum

Job Level: Director

Start Date: Immediately

Education Level: Bachelor’s Degree

Industry: Computer Software / SaaS

Function: IT, Development & Engineering

Description:

Key Responsibilities

• Providing technical leadership whilst guiding and motivating a team

• In depth technical experience is required to assist in balancing effort across the skills base in the team, whilst empowering and motivating the team to step up the challenges
• Actively encourage and support cross team collaboration

• In parallel with making team goals visible, develop the team to work together to achieve common goals as well as being proactive in providing excellent “customer service” across functional teams

• Performing appraisals and identifying skills development objectives

• Performance appraisals and coaching to recognise weaknesses, coupled to effective development goals and activities
• Managing, coaching and developing a team of engineers
• Line management of a team of engineers, responsible for their development and well-being.
• Working with the team to improve processes and adopting best practices
• Involve the whole team in reviewing successes and identifying issues to innovate process solutions and through all recruitment activities
• Perform technical duties alongside the team
• The team leader is also a contributor and shares in the tasks required to achieve team goals
• Recruiting new team members
• Accurately determine required skillsets to complement the team, define job descriptions and follow
• Approving holiday/working-from-home requests
• Continuous awareness of day to day team dynamics, work locations and absences that may impact team performance

Skills Profile

• People management, coaching and development skills

• Collaboration and influence skills

• Clear and concise communication skills (verbal and written)

• Presentation and mentoring skills

• Ability to drive improvement 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

• Proactive and enthusiastic quick learner with the ability to work as part of a team

• 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 collaborative relationships

Role Specific Skills

Essential

• Proven experience of leading and motivating a successful team
• Hiring, coaching, appraising and developing
• Motivating, mentoring, delegating and reporting
• Diligent management of stakeholders, priorities and dependancies
• 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 report and monitor own progress and that of other team members
• Ability to lead effective project planning and prioritisation sessions
• Ability to inspire and motivate others
• Ability to adapt to a changing technical environment

Desirable

• Distributed systems using a JMS Compliant Message Broker such as ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ etc
• Java Database Access Layer (JdbcTemplate & Hibernate)
• Spring framework
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS
• Ubuntu
• Database design and writing SQL
• Experience of using the Eclipse development environment
• User Interface design and GWT development
• C# and C++
• Experience of successful
• Patent creation, application and submission

Education and Qualifications

• Degree or equivalent
• 5+ years experience in delivering commercial software

Company stack

The company is 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.

Their 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 us with that.

How the company works

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. The 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!

Location: Reading, UK

Salary: GBP55,000.00 Per Annum

Job Level: Director

Start Date: Immediately

Education Level: Bachelor’s Degree

Industry: Computer Software / SaaS

Function: IT, Development & Engineering