Head of Software Development

**What will you love about leading our software development team?** Working with highly talented, enthusiastic and dedicated software engineers, your job is to enable them to do their best. If you’re an inspirational leader who can bring out excellence in people, use best-practice techniques in software development and manageadvanced software products then you will thrive in this role. This is an opportunity to lead our development team as we continue to produce cutting edge software tools for the global aerospace and automotive industries. **Head of Software Development** **York, UK** **£55,000 - £85,000 Dependent on Experience** **Full Time, Permanent** Rapita Systems is a specialist in on-target software verification, performance profiling, and timing analysis of real-time embedded systems. Our major customers are in the aerospace and automotive industries. **What will you be doing?** Your goal is the team’s success: the head of software development is responsible for leadership of the development team, managing both the people and software projects. It will include: - Planning and scheduling development, product management, feature planning. - Ensuring the quality of our products through best-practice techniques and process improvement. - Investigating and understanding customer needs, leading to the specification and design of new software and features. Driving current and future technology, coming up with innovative ideas and seeing them through to completion. - Helping and motivating the team to efficiently produce high quality software through mentoring and leadership. - Recruitment, performance review, team management. A day in the life might include: a one-on-one meeting with a team-lead, helping an engineer resolve a bug, an all-team meeting, working with the marketing team on a feature idea, evaluating a new development and giving feedback to the team. You will work with excellent engineers, helping them to grow, mentoring, leading, motivating and supporting everyone to contribute to the commercial success of the company. **Which technologies will you be working with?** The team works with many technologies, from a variety of programming languages (C, Ada, C++, Python, scripting) and specialist internal languages, through to embedded compilers, debuggers, and various management tools including gitlab, SVN, bugzilla. **What would make you great at this role?** You need experience of managing a software team - this is a senior position that focuses on management. You’ll need excellent interpersonal skills and the ability to understand and inspire people. You’ll need a software background - while the focus of your time may not be programming, you need to have the technical background that lets you really understand what your team are doing and provide technical guidance. It would be beneficial to have experience of highly reliable software, safety critical, aerospace software, DO-178C, ISO 26262, agile processes, embedded software and product management. Above all, you’ll need a positive "can do" attitude that allows you and the team to solve complex, technically challenging problems. Your strong mix of interpersonal/management skills and software experience will mean that you easily grasp the technicalaspects of the product and help the development team work smoothly and efficiently to deliver. Competitive salary depending on experience. Location: York, UK. Applicants must be eligible to work in the UK and while some remote working is possible you need to be able to be in the York office for the majority of your time. **Why Join Rapita?** Rapita offers flexible working times, 33 days of flexible annual leave (including bank holidays), a private pension, cycle to work scheme, team away days, fruit and drinks, office cycle/car parking and other benefits. Most roles can be done with a hybridapproach of home-working and office working. Our office is based in the lovely city of York, which is a fantastic place to live and work - if you need it, we can help you settle in with a relocation package. **You must be eligible to work in the UK.** Other suitable skills and experience include: IT, IT Manager, IT, Software Development, Senior Management, Computer and IT, Software, Team Leader, Aerospace, Programming, Technology, Business Operations