Technical Team Leader - Build Team

Overview

Our Technical Team Leaders form the core of our client facing "Build" Teams and drive change for our bespoke project delivery. In this role, you will be building high quality, re-usable, software and solutions. You will be responsible for defining, championing, and evolving processes and working patterns to maximise developer efficiency and throughput.

You will be leading a team of developers (approx. 2-4), with varying levels of experience and differing specialisations.

Further key responsibilities include: Pro-actively enhancing systems, products and tools to ensure ever increasing stability, security, accessibility and maintainability. Re-actively handling incidents calmly, knowing when to lead the charge and when to defer to other team members. You will be able to clearly communicate with both clients and colleagues, with differing technical abilities professionally and politely. Finally, you will be able to quickly build an in-depth understanding and knowledge of our platforms and systems to start working with them effectively and efficiently.

Activities

Day to day:

• Attending daily internal team and project stand-ups.
• Independently prioritising work as needed taking into consideration, dependencies, milestones and deadlines for yourself and your team.
• Liaising with other Technical Team Leaders to discuss, debate, decide and action various high and low level technical challenges.
• Creating high-quality, in-depth, understandable and digestible breakdowns of requirements. These may be new features, improvements, refactoring recommendations, architectural decision justifications for debate, or larger epics for wider spans of work.
• Writing high quality NodeJS functions for use within Forms and Endpoints.
• Building maintainable, fault tolerant BPMN process diagrams.
• Building intuitive Forms with a focus on UX and accessibility.
• Mentoring team members, providing in-depth code review feedback and clearly identifying areas that must be modified and areas that are "nitpicks" or nice to have changes based on time pressures.
• Review monitoring systems to identify and breakdown errors or emergent performance issues. Proposing solutions or providing enough information for other more relevant teams to further triage.
• Providing assistance to 1st line support teams in the event of incidents/outages.
• Maintaining proactive and open lines of communication with colleagues to ensure changes to project / scope / sprint work are understood by all.
• Building prototypes to evaluate new systems, technologies or services, assessing their viability for the wider business.

Weekly, monthly, or less frequently:

• Attend regular online project meetings with clients, accurately recording outcomes and actions.
• Meeting with Senior Management to update on business objectives progress and prioritisation.
• Conducting performance reviews for direct reports. Providing constructive, actionable guidance helping them grow through from Junior to Senior.
• Interviewing and assessing new applicants for positions within your, or other, teams. Ensuring they have the requisite technical skills, soft skills and that they would be a positive influence to the business and their more direct teams.
• Assist Project Managers with resource assignment and project deadlines. Parachuting in to assist with any urgent pieces of work as a force multiplier.
• Constructively challenging longer term technical decisions across teams to ensure the best tools and patterns are being leveraged. Focusing on the requirements and wanted outcomes for the user base.
• Conducting high quality, relaxed, and confident presentations or demonstrations to variety of audiences with differing skills. Both internally and externally.
• Complete regular personal development which may include learning new skills, or exploring new ways of working.
• Share best practice, updates, or new skills with team members.

The Build Team

As part of our cohort of "Build Teams" you'll be joining, and leading, a team of ~2-4 junior, mid and senior developers, with varying specialisations and skills, focusing on the delivery of bespoke solutions for our clients.

We leverage our Digital Platform to build Forms, Endpoints and Processes with a focus on high quality server side NodeJS JavaScript, HTML template generation with Handlebars and BPMN process designs for complex logic driven transaction-based solutions. We build, maintain, and leverage modern version control systems, incorporating CI/CD scripts via YAML, PowerShell, Bash and Docker to effectively automate delivery.

Reporting to the Head of Build whilst working alongside support, project managers, other Build Team leaders and the wider technical teams to achieve project and team business objectives. These include:

• Ensuring high quality solutions are delivered that are secure, performant, scalable, accessible and maintainable all whilst meeting our client's requirements.
• Building and improving our wider Products, or knowing when to leverage these, in a similar manner to ensure we are as cost effective as possible.
• Identifying and removing the manual, in favour of autonomous actions that benefit the wider business.
• Being an advocate for change and "the new" across the organisation.
• Identifying new opportunities and having the confidence to seize them and demonstrate their worth to the wider business, appreciating that some ideas will fail.
• Ensure that our client's needs are met or exceeded in the best possible ways, contributing to maintaining our strong client retention and renewals. 
• Plan for, and answer, customer queries and concerns providing proactive solutions.

Who we are looking for

We understand that experience comes in all shapes and sizes, so if you believe that you could excel in this role and have transferable skills (even if you don't meet every requirement below), we'd love to hear from you.

• You have expert level knowledge of Software Engineering covering Object Orientated Programming (APIE, SOLID), scalable and performant systems (Big O) alongside experience in building secure applications and common security flaws to protect against (OWASP).
• You have an advanced knowledge of version control systems such as Git and experience leveraging these to work concurrently, effectively and have used CI and CD to further automate away manual actions via YAML or similar technologies.
• You have expert knowledge in web technologies (HTML/CSS/JS). Experience in C# .NET Framework/Core, Java EE or Kotlin are desirable.
• You have a broad knowledge of Web Technologies and have extensive experience integrating with varying API's. Building and leveraging CMS and CRM style applications would be a bonus.
• You have an awareness, or experience, working with ISO 9001/27001 compliance in mind and understand the importance of this on the business.
• Ideally, you will have experience building and developing, complex Forms along with BPMN style process flows.
• You can demonstrate experience of successful delivery of technology solutions, projects and programmes.
• You're comfortable taking ownership of developing your own knowledge of technical solutions and new software, this might be through trial and error, asking colleagues for advice, or reading documentation to find the right answers.
• You can demonstrate excellent problem-solving skills and love to help others find solutions to complex process problems.
• You have experience leading and mentoring developers. Respectfully and constructively providing feedback to benefit their growth and highlight their strengths.
• You can demonstrate experience of considering all aspects of a project; thinking about the bigger picture, you can identify risks and dependencies that may impact successful delivery.
• You appreciate the necessity of taking a collaborative and inclusive approach to work; you're able to identify and manage conflict constructively. 
• You can demonstrate where you have supported, inspired, influenced and motivated teams.
• You can demonstrate excellent verbal communication skills with the ability to communicate complex topics in a succinct and logical way.
• You understand the importance of active listening and you can identify key facts and valuable insights from others.
• You understand and can discuss when short term fixes are suitable ahead of longer term modifications that may have wider ramifications.
• You can demonstrate prototyping systems, both for known business requirements and to explore potential new opportunities. Ideally, you will have examples of where these have evolved beyond prototypes into fully delivered solutions.
• You have experience making widespread, impactful, changes to a business. Providing detailed documentation and justification to ensure the wider business, as a whole, can smoothly transition and evolve without leaving teams or members behind.
• The ideal candidate must be eligible for Security Clearance.

Location

We believe happy employees are the key to a job well done and we recognise that there is no one size fits all approach to happy. That's why we do our absolute best to provide flexible working opportunities wherever possible. This role can be fully remote (UK only), or you can choose to work from our spacious Plymouth offices some, or all of the time.

Application process

Our full recruitment process can be found on our website.

Important: For this role we will not be considering applications that do not include a cover letter or supporting statement that clearly sets out how you meet our preferred requirements as detailed above.  If you are shortlisted, we may also choose to include a task as part of the selection process which could include a presentation, written test or a scenario-based activity.

Please submit a cover letter that reflects your personal insights and experiences. We value authentic, human-written content over AI-generated text.

Things you need to know

Selection process:

To apply, complete our short application form and upload your CV using the link below. 

Please contact us if you need the application form in an alternative format or if you require any reasonable adjustments to the selection process, including the interview (for example physical access, communication support, personal support).

Interview details:

Initial interviews will be via Teams with our Department Lead and If successful you will be invited to attend a competency-based interview either here at the GOSS offices in Plymouth or again via Teams which will last approximately 1.5 hours  You will be expected to be able to evidence previous examples of your work.

Due to our contractual obligations, the successful candidate must be able to achieve SC security clearance for this role. The role can be started on BPSS; full SC clearance will be required within the first 3 months. Please note that SC clearance requires a current and continuous period of residency in the UK of at least the last 5 years. Other checks for SC clearance include credit and financial history, both spent and unspent criminal records, security service records, and gaps in employment history. This is not a definitive list; more information can be found on the gov.uk website.

GOSS is proud to be an equal opportunities employer. This means that decisions concerning recruitment will be based on the needs of the business and not any assumptions based on sex, race, age, disability, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, married or civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity, religion or belief.

As an employer we are committed to promoting and protecting the physical and mental health and well-being of all our staff.

Due to the large volume of applications GOSS receive, if you have not heard from us within 4 weeks of applying, on this occasion its likely that you have been unsuccessful in your application.

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