Remote Software Engineering Team Lead

As a Software Engineering Team Lead, you will be responsible for leading a team of development and test engineers, providing mentorship and guiding them in delivering projects that may vary in size and complexity. You will have line management responsibilities for the engineers in your team.

This is a delivery focussed role reporting into an Engineering Manager. The person should be comfortable with reading code and occasionally writing code where required(<10%). They should have a deep experience of Java, experience working with cloud platforms like Azure, a good understanding of DevOps principles, API development, database development and software best-practices.

Initially in your role as a Software Engineering Team Lead, you’ll be responsible for partnering with MWI stakeholders to plan and execute product changes required to deploy the MWI Merlin practice management system in new geographical areas. The newly developed solution will provide veterinary organisations outside of the UK with practice management capability that enables client engagement, patient care and management of functions required to run a vet business. The first phase of the project is preparation for launch into the US market with a focus on compliance and localisation of functionality.

Our platform is primarily based onJava/JEE running on Azure and SQL Server today, but rapidly changing as we re-engineer the platform.In terms of platform direction:

• The front-end is currently based on GWT but we’re actively moving towards React/Typescript for larger new front-end development
• We’re decomposing the monolithic platform into a series of services based on SpringBoot 3 primarily. We’ve currently at about 20+ microservices and creating more every week.
• We host the platform on Microsoft Azure using DevOps technology including Terraform and Docker. We are actively adopting Kubernetes and our first production use will be going live in mid-23.
• We’re solving problems at scale with thousands of veterinary practices and users in a mission critical environment.

Our teams are distributed around the UK with offices based in Camberley, Stoke and Castle Cary. There are 75+ people in the UK today across three divisions: Product, Engineering and Support. We are scaling to over forty people within our department with significant investment from our parent company. This is a hybrid position for the candidate in the South with occasional (monthly) visits to the office.

Skills and Responsibilities

You will:

• Coach, mentor and line manage development and test engineers.
• Deliver cloud-based solutions using Java & Spring technology.
• Work with the engineering managers to build and manage delivery plans.
• Work towards shaping and delivering the long-term product and engineering roadmaps.
• Work with the architects and principal engineers to build solutions that help drive towards the target state architecture
• Work with the product owner and SMEs on functional and non-functional solutions in a collaborative manner to solve problems in the most efficient way.
• Work on scaling challenges-performance, robustness, reliability, security-with our cloud-services team on our services-based architecture.
• Work with our test engineers to ensure quality as well as performing load, stress and security testing with the team.
• Work with our engineering group on iterating towards our target architecture for the platform.
• Work with our operational teams to help expedite queries and to resolve issues in a timely and appropriate manner.

Essential

We’re looking for people with the following skills:

• 5+ years of experience working as a software engineering team lead, or technical team lead.
• 8+ years of experience working in the capacity of a software engineer or developer within multi-disciplinary development teams.
• The core Java language and JEE ecosystem: we use Java 8/17and Spring across different applications
• Experience with back-end engineering using Java Enterprise Edition or Spring, including RESTful API development.
• Excellent understanding of SQL and working with databases (DDL and DML) - we use SQL Server and have dedicated DBA’s and developers who make significant contribution in this area.
• Experience working in a cloud-based environment working closely with the DevOps team- provisioning, deploying and monitoring applications.
• Experience working with build tools such as Maven and CI solutions (ADO,Jenkins, Octopus, ADO).
• Experience with test frameworks for unit, integration and API testing (we use JUnit, Mockito and Arquillian).

Desirable

Ideally you will have:

• Web-application development technology with React/Angular. We currently use Google WebToolkit.
• Experience with microservices based architecture.
• Experience with Kubernetes solutions (e.g.AKS) and Docker, Terraform a plus.
• Experience with site-reliability engineering practices.

Company Benefits

• Company pension
• Gym subsidy
• Bonus scheme
• Life Assurance
• Health Shield
• Employee Assistance Program

Interview Process

We aim to keep the interview process as short and relaxed as possible. We have 3 main stages:

• Telephone Interview - A thirty-minute discussion to understand your background, technical skills and project experience;
• Two 1-hour Video interviews – Assess technical skills including deep dive into previous experience in key areas and technologies. The interview will also focus on soft skills, delivery experience, leadership qualities and ability to play a lead role within a cross-functional engineering team.