Lead Server Engineer

Department: Engineering

Based at: Salford Quays

We’re looking for an experienced Lead Server Engineer to own the server-side solution on our client projects, to lead the engineers building them, navigating the complexities of large-scale client ecosystems, working across sectors from finance and retail to health and sport.

As a Lead Server Engineer you’ll set the technical direction for the server side of your project and stay hands-on delivering it, working in collaboration with Architects, The technical implementation decisions are yours to own. You will be working in a cross-functional team alongside mobile, web, QA, design and product, coaching the engineers around you and taking a leading role in refinement, planning and reviews. You’ll be the client’s main technical contact for the server side implementation.

What you’ll be working on

You’ll own the implementation of the server-side architecture on your project and deliver it hands-on, setting projects up from scratch and establishing the standards the rest of the team works to.

• Set projects up from scratch, including repositories, CI/CD pipelines, environments and infrastructure as code.
• Own API design, data modelling and third-party integration, and the contracts between your services and the teams that consume them.
• Own non-functional requirements, covering security, performance, resilience, observability and the running cost of what you build.
• Own the developer test strategy for your platform, and lead code review as a coaching activity rather than a gate.
• Identify and refine requirements, risks, dependencies, and assumptions as early as possible and produce accurate estimates.
• Coach and mentor the engineers on your project, and take a leading role in refinement, planning, retrospectives and sprint reviews.
• Work directly with clients and third parties to elicit technical requirements, map the dependencies that matter and support good decision-making.
• Support the business in winning new work through bids, proposals and estimation.

What you’ll bring to the team

You’ll bring depth in Node and TypeScript on AWS, and the judgement to know which of the available options is right for the problem in front of you. Just as importantly, you’ll bring the communication and coaching skills that turn a good technical decision into one the whole team understands and can build on.

• Solid commercial experience with either Node.js and TypeScript or .Net
• Experience building and running production systems on AWS or Azure, with a working understanding of what your design decisions cost. Experience with serverless architectures.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, using tools like AWS CDK, CloudFormation, Terraform or similar.
• Experience building secure, scalable and performant systems, treating security and observability as things you own rather than attributes of good code.
• Experience and enjoyment leading and coaching engineers, you recognise you are measured on the success of the team, not your own individual output.
• Passionate about learning new technologies, comfortable with change and facilitating discussions about technologies and systems you aren’t familiar with.
• Experience within a multi-disciplined team, and the ability to make sure standards are carried out by others rather than merely documented.
• An empathetic communicator, comfortable with clients and stakeholders — including difficult conversations around deadlines and budgets.
• A strong background in Object Oriented programming.