Senior Software Engineer (Backend) with Line Management
Thomas International, United Kingdom
Job Description
Why be an Engineer at Thomas International?
At Thomas International we're on a mission to positively impact the global talent solutions market with digital-first, scientifically valid, outcome driven product experiences that every one of our customers consider indispensable.
To support our mission, Product Engineering is looking for a Senior Software Engineer (Backend) to join one of our cross-functional and highly collaborative feature teams (comprised of Engineers, Product Managers, UX designers and Psychologists). Together, you'll solve problems and provide customer value through lean agile and continuous delivery practices, all whilst building and evolving a modern software platform.
Our Tech Stack
We like our tech to work for us and are constantly evaluating and re-evaluating our choices. Nothing is ever set in stone, we don't expect you to know it all on day 1, and we believe that understanding patterns and concepts comes before specific technologies. Our stack is built around:
- Cloud native (Kubernetes in Azure)
- Messaging; event-driven design (NserviceBus)
- Microservices (REST APIs, typically C#.Net)
- Flexible data storage (Cosmos DB, Redis)
- Graph databases (using Gremlin API)
- Automated testing (TestCafe, SauceLabs)
- Monitoring (AppInsights, Prometheus + Grafana)
- Single-page Applications (React, some Angular)
For a Senior Software Engineer (Backend), knowledge of general architectural patterns and experience developing microservices based event-driven platforms would be advantageous.
Requirements
To better support our people with clear role expectations and career development in Product Engineering, we are in the process of defining all our roles’ accountabilities with the SFIA-7 framework. At Thomas International, the position of Senior Software Engineer conforms with the following SFIA-7 skills at level 4 and applies to the context of a Scrum team:
- Software design
- Programming/software development
- Testing
- Problem management
- Resourcing
Typical Activities for a Senior Software Engineer
As a SFIA-7 Level 4 role, a Senior Software Engineer is an effective, visible, proactive, and influential technical leader within the wider Product and Technology group, and especially within the Engineering community.
This role requires that you will be responsible for the line management of no more than 4 Engineers. As your focus will be partially split between delivering feature work and supporting your reporting line, your team will have realistic expectations as to your contributions to feature work, and your personal measures of success will be partially tied to the success of those whom you support.
Typically activities within a sprint could include:
- Participate in feature delivery within a cross-functional team
- Coach or mentor junior members of the team; share knowledge freely, help others with their technical development needs and quality of delivery
- Hold 121s with your reporting line; provide candid feedback, coach through challenges, and agree individual plans to support and champion their career development needs
- Contribute to the people manager community; work with the Product Engineering managers to promote initiatives, monitor team health and cohesion, and participate in recruitment activity
- Collaborate with the Lead Software Engineer to ensure architectural alignment within the feature team; engage junior members in decision making
- Support non-technical peers with subject-matter expertise throughout the lifecycle of the innovation process; collaborate with Product Managers, Psychologists, and Scrum Masters.
- Coordinate the resolution of incidents; apply good facilitation, problem solving and critical thinking skills to support timely resolution
- Champion good data practices: privacy and security are of the utmost importance and a crucial consideration in system design
- Champion automated test and quality practices; collaborate with the Test Engineer to ensure best practice within your team
Benefits
Learning Culture
In the wider Product and Technology community we put continuous improvement of our staff, processes, and systems at the heart of everything we do. In support of this value, all members of the Technology Group have access to Ten-Percent Time, which can be used for personal development, experimentation, or collaborative innovation across the group. This equates to 1 day per 2-week sprint protected, self-directed and applied to any of the following three pillars of organisational betterment:
- Learning and development (Lamp;D); study and deliberate practice
- Quality improvement; of our produ