Softwire on cord

Softwire

Practice Lead

External position
Hiring internally for Softwire?
Consultancy
Softwire is at the forefront of bespoke digital engineering, working with some of the UK's leading brands.
Posted
3 weeks ago
Checked
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2 hours ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: System Engineer
Experience level: Lead
Core skills considered: Agile, Scrum, Cloud Computing, AWS, Security and Compliance
Other skills considered: Technical Direction, Building Teams, Business Analysis, Project Management, Stakeholder Management

Logistics

Base salary: £110K - £125K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Future Systems Engineering is one of Softwire's four services, alongside AI Transformation, Data Strategy & Platforms, and Digital Product & Customer Experience. It covers technical strategy and architecture, legacy modernisation, cloud platform engineering, security architecture and resilience, and cost management, largely for regulated industries and critical national infrastructure. Internally we call our services Practices, which is where this role title comes from.

The Practice Lead owns and develops that service. You will make sure what we offer clients remains relevant three years from now, and that our engineers can deliver it. The work falls into four parts:


Responsibilities

  • Articulate our service. Support the go-to-market teams selling Future Systems Engineering into our sectors: energy and utilities, financial services, government, insurance.
  • Discern what is coming next. Track technology shifts, vendor moves, regulatory change and client demand signals, and form a view on what they mean for us.
  • Enable new kinds of work. Develop the approaches, offerings and commercial propositions that let us take on engagements we have not run before.
  • Strengthen our capability. Run the systems engineering Community of Practice, spread good ideas between accounts, and raise the technical bar across the company.

You will split your time roughly evenly between billable client work and practice development, managing that balance yourself. The client work sits mostly at the front of engagements: early conversations, discovery, architecture reviews, workshops and diagnostics, then enabling and supporting the delivery teams who run the resulting programmes.

Practice Leads work as a team, one per service, and report to the CTO. They sit in an office of the CTO alongside our two heads of capability and Vendor Relations. You will also build a pod of three to five hands-on mid-level and senior technical consultants who move quickly into tactical engagements, take new practice ideas forward, and support your work more widely. Beyond that pod your influence rests on credibility with engineers and with client executives, so you will need to stay close enough to the technology to hold both conversations properly.


You will be responsible for

Practice development, around half your time:

  • Owning the Future Systems Engineering proposition: what we sell, how we describe it, how we price it, and how it changes over time.
  • Deciding what we should be able to do in three years that we cannot do today, and building the offerings, approaches and skills that get us there.
  • Leading Softwire's thought leadership on systems engineering: writing, speaking at events, taking part in industry forums, and directing a pipeline of content produced by colleagues.
  • Coordinating the systems engineering Community of Practice, and developing the skills and standards of engineers across our accounts.
  • Building and directing a small pod of hands-on technical consultants who take practice ideas from proposition through to first delivery.

Client work and go-to-market, around half your time:

  • Leading the technical shaping of bids and pitches that call on Future Systems Engineering: running early-stage client conversations alongside Client Directors, setting the solution direction, and writing the technical sections of proposals.
  • Running discovery engagements yourself: workshops, technical assessments, architecture and modernisation strategies, written recommendations for client boards.
  • Setting up major engagements for success, making sure the delivery team understands the client's need and the context behind it, then supporting them through the work.
  • Building strong relationships with senior client stakeholders, and using them to find further areas where we can add value.
  • Mentoring and coaching colleagues in both technical and consultancy skills.

About You

  • You have 8+ years experience in technical roles, including at least 4 years in an agency or consultancy context. You understand how consultancies win, price and scope work.
  • You have designed and delivered systems at scale in demanding environments, and you can speak with authority about non-functional requirements: performance, resilience, security, cost.
  • You are fluent in modern cloud architecture, including serverless and event-driven designs, and you can explain to a sceptical client where those approaches pay off and where they do not.
  • You have a working understanding of how AI is changing engineering practice and platform requirements, and an interest in developing it further.
  • You are commercially fluent. You think about business drivers, procurement, contracting models and margin, and you can connect an engineering decision to its commercial consequence.
  • You are comfortable in ambiguous contexts, deciding on incomplete information across competing stakeholder agendas, and distilling disparate needs into clear, practical solutions with broad buy-in.
  • You follow the market closely: vendor strategies, pricing shifts, regulatory change, emerging techniques, and what clients are starting to ask for. You can turn scattered signals into a clear position on what we should do about it.
  • You have excellent consulting and advisory skills. You hold peer-level conversations with C-suite executives about business strategy and tell them something they did not already know. You present comfortably, write well, and can build a compelling message.
  • You have pre-sales experience in an agency or consultancy context, and you want more of it. Client Directors own the commercial relationship; you enjoy shaping the opportunity with them and showing prospective clients we are a good fit.
  • You have built, or want to build, a public profile in systems engineering: writing for a trade publication, speaking at a conference, contributing to a standards body, or sitting on a working group. It makes up a good part of the role.
  • You are a leader: you understand how to inspire people to follow you and to create the conditions for success across teams you have no formal authority over.
  • You are collaborative and your default approach is to work as a team, openly sharing information, resources and comms. You see all other colleagues as allies, and you are comfortable in a culture which values and rewards collective success over personal attribution.
  • You take a can-do approach and don't mind getting your hands dirty and leaning into issues and opportunities that you identify. You don't need a perfect environment to thrive and you are comfortable taking ownership of situations and problems with a positive approach to addressing them.

Company Benefits

  • Pension: Additional 5% of salary
  • 25 days annual leave (with the option to buy and sell)
  • Time off for company-wide morale activities, time off for charitable / CSR activities
  • Free annual eye test, income protection, cycle to work, electric vehicle lease schemes, and payroll charity donations.
Practice Lead at Softwire
Position posted 3 weeks 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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