Lead Engineer (Platform Engineering)

ABOUT THE JOB

We are looking to hire a Lead Engineer to join our global team in Technology. This is a challenging, fast-paced and exciting environment, with plenty of opportunities to influence and grow the technology area.

We are looking for a Lead Engineer to build and lead the Platform Engineering team to proactively ensure the stability, resilience and scale of our core platform applications by automation, testing and engineering.

The Lead Engineer will work alongside all areas of technology to ensure that technical solutions are aligned across teams, deliver value to the customers as well as ensuring consistent monitoring, logging and alerting

The Lead Engineer is responsible for building capability and maturing operational ways of working across multiple cross-functional teams, with focus on technical excellence and a high-performance culture.

The key values that we strive towards in the Technology are:

• Ownership
• Continuous Improvement Mindset
• Trust
• Honesty

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Line manage engineers in the team and be responsible for their career development, well-being and performance
• Provide leadership and guidance across the Platform Engineering team; motivating and driving the team with technical leadership acting as a subject matter expert and leading best practice techniques
• To lead the Platform Engineering team in ensuring technical assurance in significant projects, for the delivery of quality technical deliverables, which may involve several teams or technologies
• To oversee the Platform Engineering team to ensure they are involved in every step of the application software development lifecycle, including product design, development, testing, and transition into operation
• Provide coaching and mentoring to the Platform Engineering team to improve their skillset, increase knowledge and set the benchmark of quality and precision engineering
• Oversee the implementation of service transition and change and release process changes, ensuring that processes are reviewed and improved with onus on optimisation
• Evaluate risks and defects, analysing specifications, and customising applications for specific customer needs
• Work with technology teams to produce and maintain standards, guidelines, and pattern catalogue
• Measuring and driving delivery and quality improvements through the capture and analysis of metrics
• Build innovative prototypes and lead technology teams to develop quality solutions, by translating architectural designs into lower level implementation details, helping implement user stories if required
• To lead and influence teams to ensure quality and operational excellence, and to ensure teams are aligned to design patterns and design collateral
• Work with Engineering management to drive through best practice, techniques and technology both on the team and around the company
• Foster a culture of open exchange of ideas, innovation and continuous improvements
• Balance the commercial needs of the business against the ideal technical design, proposing sound phased or tactical implementations where appropriate
• Understand the importance of and be a strong advocate for non-functionals eg. monitoring, alerting, logging etc
• Define adequate strategies to deal with technical debt
• Collaborate with the operational teams to enhance company’s Incident and Problem management capabilities
• Accountable for the quality of the implementation and deployment of the team’s work
• Accountable for the security, capacity and performance of the system
• Act as escalation point in Incident management processes
• Take ownership of RCA activities in your respective area
• Learn from your experiences, adopting a continuous improvement mindset to help make better decisions

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

List of skills we think you need:

• proficient in agile practices
• demonstrable experience of leadership in complex, cross-company projects to deliver operational improvements
• Strong engineering background acquired during a previous hands-on development role
• managerial and leadership skills, able to motivate and lead personal development plans for employees
• driving change and handling difficult situations
• dealing with change on a daily basis
• ability to demonstrate the value of changes introduced
• proven communication skills
• OS Administration - Windows, Linux, etc..
• Web servers - apache, nginx, IIS, Drupal, etc..
• Databases - Oracle, mysql, mssql, etc..
• Caching - redis, memcached, varnish, etc..
• Traffic Management - F5, haproxy, keepalived, etc..
• Scripting - bash, bat, python, perl, etc..
• CI/CD - gitlab, jenkins, ansible, terraform, etc..

List of skills we'd love you to have:

• Virtualisation and Orchestration - vmware, docker, kubernetes, etc..
• CDNs - CDNetworks, Akamai, Incapsula, etc..
• Networking - Cisco, Brocade, etc..
• Programming Languages - PHP, .NET, Java, JS, Ruby, Flutter, etc..
• Cloud - Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, etc..
• APIs - REST, JSON, SOAP, etc..
• Testing - testrails, k6, gatling, etc…
• Monitoring and Observability - ELK, Grafana, Prometheus, Prometheus, PRTG, etc..
• Security - trellix, fireeye, OKTA, cisco anyconnect, entrust, etc..