Location: Full-Time Office Based, Twinkl HQ, Sheffield
Annual Salary: 40,000 - 80,000 dependent on experience
Contract: Permanent, Full-Time | Recruiter: Frazer Scott
About Twinkl
Twinkl is the UK’s largest digital educational publisher and an Alexa top 500 (UK and Ireland) ranked website. In the last 12 months, we have had over 166 million visits to our sites, with an average of 6 million users accessing our websites around the world every month. We’re passionate about helping educators on a global scale and are now looking to introduce a Head of Web Development to help us scale and develop our Web Development Team to achieve our ambitious goals.
Key Technologies amp; Tools:
React, Javascript / Node.js, CSS, HTML, PHP 7, MySQL, Redis/Memcache, ElasticSearch, Unix, Typical Production AWS amp; GCP Services, Incapsula, Cloudinary, SendGrid, Twilio, Beanstalk, Kickbox, New Relic, UserSnap, Webmaster Tools.
About this Role
In joining us as our Head of Web Development you’ll be leading Twinkl’s four web development sub-teams and take on overall responsibility for the development and maintenance of Twinkl’s customer-facing and internal websites and web tools. We’re looking for someone who’s keen to move into a role that gives equal precedent to leadership, strategy and the technical side of web development.
Day-to-day, you'll directly manage our senior team leads, who in turn manage teams of ~7 developers across:
- Web Support: responsible for refactoring legacy code, bug fixes and implementing features that have a quick turn around.
- Web Projects: who manage and maintain a suite of customer facing and internal React Web Applications, such as our drag and drop resource builder Twinkl Create.
- Web Features: delivering 1-2 week web projects, landing pages and longer term feature development.
- Optimisation: a mixture of CRO, UX and code improvement/update projects.
You’ll help them deliver on their day-to-day workload whilst developing and implementing strategies for each area. You will also oversee the recruitment, retention and upskilling of developers into the team, making sure that we always have the skills and resources we need to fulfil the needs of our rapidly growing customer base.
You’ll partner closely with our CTO and CEO to achieve this, as well as senior stakeholders across our Project, UI/UX, and Product Teams.
Ongoing projects/how you’ll spend your day:
- Owning and developing Twinkl’s web development strategy
- Reviewing, planning and prioritising web development projects for delivery
- Mentoring, managing and supporting our senior web leads
As a leader a Twinkl, you will:
- Recognise that there is no "one size fits all" approach to leadership, taking the time to get to know each team member personally to understand their strengths, interests and ambitions
- Hold 1:1s every 4 - 6 weeks with your team to discuss and evaluate performance, collaborating on a roadmap for their development
- Manage HR processes and administration for your team (eg. contract/salary reviews)
- Communicate key business messages, owning the narrative on decisions made and ensuring effective feedback
Requirements
We're interested in hearing from anyone with solid technical leadership experience who meets the majority of the following criteria:
- Experience working and managing/co-ordinating work on a high-volume, retail/subscription service or similar.
- Experience of, and a thirst for, building and developing a high-performing team that continually and consistently discerns and delivers real customer value.
- Excellent technical proficiency in: HTML, JS, CSS, PHP 7, MySQL and effective use of caching (Redis/Memcache) and be capable of personally undertaking end-to-end full-stack development work where required.
- Production experience working with React and Node.js.
- Experience monitoring, analysing, understanding and addressing/improving website performance and security experience using APM, logging and monitoring tooling.
- Production experience working with Email Service Providers, Payment Providers and Search Technologies, plus a solid grasp of Web Standards.
- Experience working with, or a strong understanding of the role of typical high-volume web infrastructure amp; components with respect to development HTTPS/SSL, CDN, WAF, etc.
- Experience of working on/with SEO, UI/UX and CRO in a high-volume context.
- An ability to analyse, establish a strategy for and lead on the modernisation of legacy code.
Benefits
In return for everything you can bring, we c