Technical Lead

Job Title:  Technical Lead

Reporting To: Director of IT and Data Security 

Location: Hybrid (Our offices are based at Phoenix Brewery, W10 6SZ)

Contract: Full Time, 12 Month Fixed Term Contract 

Salary: Up To £65,000

Benefits:

• Enhanced policies including 25 days annual leave per year, plus public holidays;
• Company electronic devices;
• Competitive pension;
• Remote and flexible working;
• Excellent opportunities for training and career progression.

Closing date: 13th December 2024

Job Purpose

Create and operate MHI’s technical capability to create and manage products and services. Do so whilst balancing the needs of product, engineering, security and compliance.

Main Responsibilities

Primary

• Develop a set of appropriate methodologies and standard patterns for delivering new products and services. Ability to create quick mock-ups and prototypes.
• Employ aspects of product management, solutions architecture, technical design and testing practices. 
• Consider products and services with respect to their lifespan, expected change frequency, support and maintenance requirements.
• Know how to deliver value quickly without compromising security and data protection concerns. 
• Expert knowledge of a range of technologies and languages, with the ability to be hands on and lead a small team of engineers. 
• Ability to consider and select the most appropriate technologies by considering trade-offs, implications, constraints and the needs of the organisation.

Leadership and people

• Inspire technical members of staff, help them grow and follow best practices consistently.
• Manage the concerns of interested parties (internal and external).

• Align all activities to MHI objectives and short term priorities, develop work plans to ensure resource allocation to meet needs.
• Lead on solutions and drive initiatives, ensuring the team delivers on projects

Ways of working and team culture

• Work with the Director to embed the delivery methodologies across the team and organisation.
• Encourage better ways of working to aid ‘shift left’, compliance, automated change and release Where necessary, work to change the mindset and get team buy-in
• Challenge the status quo and manual processes, identifying initiatives to remove bottlenecks
• Ensure best practice followed for implementation, test and verification, change and release
• Apply a culture of continuous improvement based on cost and benefit

Service delivery

• Take on ownership of projects as required
• Define KPIs and metrics to improve observability and drive improvements

• Create a system that keeps the Director informed of progress and issues.
• Ensure service excellence across all MHI staff and data services
• Define project deliverables (definition of done, acceptance criteria) and overseeing delivery. 
• Manage internal and external stakeholders, and represent the Technology Team in partner/supplier meetings.
• Contribute to the selection and due diligence of supplier contracts

Security and data governance

• Ensure development and run best practices are followed and aligned with our ISMS.
• Where required, contribute to cyber registers, documentation and audits (may include ownership and key deliverables strongly tied to IT domain).
• Contribute to data custodian responsibilities 

Person Specification

Essential 

• Knowledge of coding concepts and structures. 
• Experience in one or more of the following: 
  • Core cloud concepts, architectures and best practices (AWS preferred).
  • Ability to act as a data custodian for high-value data, awareness of security and compliance obligations, control options
  • Terraform and/or Cloudformation
  • Github, github actions
  • Docker, Kubernetes
  • Amplify
  • React, node.js, next.js
  • Python, exposure to other languages beneficial (e.g. Java/Kotlin)
  • DynamoDB, mongoDB, RDS
  • Working knowledge of systems lifecycle and the ability to work with key stakeholders
  • Knowledge of single sign on, federated identity and related protocols
  • OKTA
  • Monitoring and troubleshooting
  • Knowledge of high availability architectures
  • CRMs (we use Salesforce)
  • Google Workspace
  • Atlassian (JIRA, Confluence)
  • Mac/iOS and Chrome OS/Chrome Enterprise
  • Understanding of encryption technologies, symmetric/asymmetric, TLS
  • Understanding of RESTful APIs and LTI
• Project management and/or service creation experienced
• Excellent documentation skills
• Experience of supporting critical IT systems
• Excellent communicator both written and verbal
• High problem solving ability, ability to work independently and with ambiguity
• Discipline to stick to development and security best practices and hold ground, whilst remaining pragmatic
• Must have a drive for continuous learning, be committed to learning new skills and/or passing certifications. Must keep up with industry trends and technologies
• Comfortable performing a wide range of activities, including stretching to new skill/experience areas.
• Ability to manage own time, confirm priorities and expectations
• Independent worker, but knows when to ask questions, but comfortable working with the wider IT and Security Team whole organisation
• Creative thinker, but understands the importance of seeing a piece of work through to the end and on time.
• Decisive, proactive, knows when to check the boundaries. 

Desireable

• Good University Degree (thinking skills valued over subject)
• Exposure to ITIL (ITIL Foundation or higher preferred)
• Knowledge of ISO 27001 controls and CyberEssentials + 

We will be interviewing on a rolling basis and reserve the right to close the job advert early if we receive a high number of applicants.