Technical Lead

Technical Lead

Fully remote, hybrid or office-based (Berkshire, UK)

£85K PA.

iHASCO (Part of The Citation Group) is a rapidly expanding, innovative eLearning company with 100+ employees based in Bracknell, Berkshire. We are a provider of high-quality Health & Safety and HR Compliance eLearning with a keen focus on creativity, quality and most of all, simplicity.

As we embark on our continued journey of digital transformation at iHASCO we require an experienced technical lead to join our small but growing software team.

You’ll provide guidance and support as we continue to evolve and develop our eLearning platform to meet the needs of our business, working closely with the Product Owner, Visual Designers and Engineers to help us deliver on our vision and strategy for the coming years.

You’ll also work with your colleagues in The Citation Group to ensure that the technology choices we make align with the broader vision and strategy, and leverage group resources as required to support the development needs of your team.

We are looking for someone who has experience in technical leadership of a small team with experience of good engineering practices such as TDD, BDD, Clean Code, Pair Programming (to name a few) and an Agile development approach.

**Responsibilities**:

- Technical leadership of a small team currently comprising 2 Senior Software Engineers, 1 DevOps. Currently also recruiting for a further Senior Software Engineer and UI Designer/Developer.
- Leverage your knowledge and experience of various technologies both from a software and cloud/infrastructure perspective with a system thinking mindset.
- Coordinate day-to-day activities such as distribution of work, urgent requirements, stand-up meetings, comms with managers regarding system issues.
- Have the confidence to make critical decisions to ensure the stability and/or continued performance of the platform, i.e. urgent code changes/rollback to mitigate an unexpected performance issue.
- Support individuals who are new to good Engineering practices and DevOps concepts, building technical capability within the team and individuals while helping them mature in a DevOps culture.
- Demonstrate the value of good engineering practices in driving agility, such as continuous delivery, continuous integration, TDD, BDD and mob programming.
- Encourage automation and continuous delivery while working collaboratively within an Agile team helping facilitate technical decision-making in the team while creating a mentoring and coaching environment to help develop engineering capabilities.
- Encourage knowledge sharing across the team by helping them deliver working software regularly and reliably while acting as a true servant leader to empower them.
- Believe in a DevOps culture - we build and own the entire stack, and endeavour to automate as much as possible.
- Help constantly review, inspect and improve team practices.
- Help create a culture of psychology safety, feedback and retrospectives to bring about measurable improvements in technical capability, using useful metrics to support continuous improvement such as DORA metrics.
- Understand The Citation Group’s vision and strategy ensuring technology choices and direction fit into wider priorities - actively contributing to and helping to drive forward the engineering practice.
- Work with and support the Product Owner to understand and deliver on the product roadmap to agreed deadlines.
- Conduct appraisals and one-to-ones with team members, with support from the Product Owner.

Skills and Experience

You will need to have:

- Experience in any of the following: LAMP based stacks and associated tools and frameworks such as Laravel. JavaScript, preferably with ES6+ and component-based libraries such as VueJS alongside HTML and CSS.
- Automated testing, using tools such as PHPUnit, Selenium etc.
- Demonstrable experience of new technologies and know when it is appropriate to use them.
- Good understanding and experience of both architecture and infrastructure and why it is important to be aware of both as well as and the benefits of taking a microservices approach to development.
- Good understanding and experience of OO design, SOLID, Event-Driven architecture alongside experience of TDD, BDD and mob programming.
- Good understanding and experience of framework agnostic development, knowing when to use frameworks and when not to alongside caching technologies.

We are also doing the following, so any knowledge in these areas would be great:

- Deploying multiple services to cloud-based infrastructure using CI/CD pipelines.
- A good understanding of using DevOps tools (Docker, Terraform, Serverless, etc) to efficiently progress work from local and UAT environments through to production.

What to expect from us?
- Full-time, permanent opportunity
- Competitive salary of £65-75k per annum dependent on experience
- Training and development opportunities
- Paid day off on your birthday
- Health