Manifesto on cord

Manifesto

Lead Software Engineer

External position
Hiring internally for Manifesto?
Design
An agency of creatives and technologists who collaborate with exceptional organisations to change things for the better.
Active
over 6 months ago
Posted
a week ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
19 hours ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Back End
Experience level: Lead
Core skills considered: Umbraco, .NET, C#, APIs, SQL
Other skills considered: Cloud Computing, Azure, CI/CD, Agile, WCAG

Logistics

Base salary: £55K - £60K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

We are looking for a Lead Engineer to provide senior technical leadership on our Umbraco platforms, working alongside engineers, QA analysts and project managers to deliver high quality work on time and to budget.

As Lead Engineer you will provide senior technical leadership on our Umbraco platforms, working alongside engineers, QA analysts and project managers to deliver high quality work on time and to budget.

We are looking for genuine Umbraco expertise rather than broad CMS familiarity: someone who knows the platform properly, has taken sites through major version upgrades, understands Umbraco Cloud and its constraints, and can make architectural decisions that hold up over the life of a long-term retainer.

You will join an existing Umbraco practice and work as part of a small group of technical leads, sharing responsibility for standards, architectural direction and the technical health of the platforms we look after. Our Umbraco clients are charities, non-profits and membership organisations, and the platforms we build for them carry donation journeys, supporter data and services people rely on. Much of the work is continuous improvement on established platforms rather than greenfield build, which means the technical decisions you make will be lived with for years by the teams that follow you.

You will lead architecture and technical planning on the projects you are responsible for, uphold quality through code review and standards, and develop the engineers around you. This role does not carry line management or resourcing responsibility, that sits with the Engineering Manager. Your focus is technical leadership and delivery quality.

Key responsibilities

You provide senior technical leadership on the Umbraco platforms you are responsible for

  • You are a senior technical authority on Umbraco, setting and upholding standards for how we build, extend and maintain client platforms.
  • You make architectural decisions appropriate to the client's budget, team and long-term maintenance capability, not to the most interesting technical option available.
  • You plan and lead major Umbraco version upgrades, assessing package and integration compatibility before committing to a path.
  • You maintain a clear view of the technical health of the platforms you support, and surface risk before it becomes a problem.
  • You make sensible decisions about hosting, environments and deployment on Umbraco Cloud and equivalent platforms.
  • You contribute to shared Umbraco standards and practice across the business, working with other technical leads rather than in isolation.

You define the technical approach for solutions and plan their delivery

  • You consult with principal engineers and contribute to high level architecture during the Foundations phase of a project, specifying which technologies will be used and how they connect together.
  • You provide broad plans for technical delivery, identifying the main themes, their approximate sizes, levels of risk and the order they will be delivered in.
  • You produce estimates that state clearly what is in scope, what is out of scope and what assumptions the numbers rest on.
  • You manage client expectations about the process of agile delivery and what they should expect to see at the end of each sprint.

You lead the delivery of high quality software on time and to budget

  • You ensure your project team members are fully engaged and participating in all aspects of the project during evolutionary development.
  • You ensure the ceremonies of your agile project happen at the right time with the right people present, including stand-ups, backlog refinement, timebox planning, code reviews and retrospectives.
  • You ensure your team delivers the work they have committed to by the agreed deadline.
  • You uphold quality through code review, and hold the line on standards when delivery pressure argues against it.
  • You apply particular rigour to anything touching donation journeys, payment integrations or supporter data, where the cost of a defect is measured in lost income and lost trust.
  • You ensure your team collaborates well at all times, that problems are discussed early and raised to the project lead and client as necessary.

You manage the technical and support relationships with your clients

  • You are the senior technical point of contact for the clients you support, able to explain technical decisions and constraints to non-technical stakeholders clearly.
  • You lead the technical response when things go wrong on your accounts, establishing what has happened and directing the fix.
  • You ensure your clients are supported by the appropriate team members, working with engineering managers so the right profile of engineer is available.
  • You ensure the smooth operation of support boards, unblocking technical team members and resolving issues.
  • You provide the technical continuity that long-term retainer clients depend on, holding the context that would otherwise be lost between people.

You support the growth of the engineering team and promote quality software engineering

  • You develop the engineers around you, particularly those growing their Umbraco capability, through pairing, review and structured mentorship.
  • You show passion for keeping on top of current tools, standards and trends, including the Umbraco roadmap and AI-assisted engineering practice.
  • You actively contribute ideas for the growth of the engineering team.
  • You collaborate with principal engineers and the engineering leadership to deliver on departmental goals.
  • You produce relevant content on software engineering and agile delivery to raise the profile of the department.

Professional knowledge and experience

  • Deep Umbraco expertise. Extensive hands-on experience building, extending and maintaining Umbraco platforms in production, including recent major versions. This is the defining requirement of the role.
  • Strong .NET and C# capability. Confident writing clean, maintainable, object-oriented code and reviewing the work of others to the same standard.
  • Upgrade and migration experience. Proven experience planning and delivering major Umbraco version upgrades, including assessing package compatibility and managing risk on live sites.
  • Long-term platform ownership. Experience maintaining and evolving established platforms over years rather than delivering and moving on, with an understanding of how technical debt accumulates and how to manage it down.
  • Integrations and APIs. Proficiency designing and implementing APIs and integrations within complex digital ecosystems, including CRM, payment and marketing platforms.
  • Database and data management. Strong expertise in database design and efficient querying in the context of web applications.
  • Cloud and deployment. Practical experience with cloud platforms and managed hosting, particularly Azure and Umbraco Cloud, and with CI/CD pipelines and environment management.
  • Front-end capability. Adept at building responsive, accessible interfaces, with a component-based approach that supports consistency and reuse.
  • Accessibility. Deep commitment to and experience of building to WCAG standards, which matters particularly for the diverse audiences our charity clients serve.
  • Security. Proven ability to apply security best practice throughout the development lifecycle, safeguarding supporter and donor data.
  • Technical leadership. Proven leadership in agile delivery, with a focus on quality outcomes and collaborative teams. Excels at mentorship and technical direction without line management responsibility.
  • Client-facing confidence. Exceptional problem solving and the ability to manage technical client relationships directly.

Technical skills

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Company Benefits

We’ve tried to create the type of environment we’d all love to work in, and our consistent growth is testament to that. We promote professional development, with a number of benefits alongside your salary (and 5% matched pension), including but not limited to:

  • Personal training and development budget
  • Time set aside to innovate
  • Top of the range laptop of your choice
  • Free fruit and toast (a digital agency marches on its toast)
  • Weekly social events like 5-a-side football, pottery class, book club etc
  • All the goodies you’d expect from a Shoreditch agency: beer fridge, ping pong, Subbuteo, swegway, cinema room…
  • Travel to work/Bike scheme
  • Childcare vouchers
  • Season ticket loans
You’ll also benefit from a strong team culture with regular social events, learning opportunities, team days and lunches.
Lead Software Engineer at Manifesto
Position posted a week ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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