
Head of Engineering - Platforms
- London
- Permanent
- Full-time
- As the Head of Engineering for Dentsu.Connect Platform, you will manage and mentor software teams delivering a combination of applications and platform services for use by end users and Development teams.
- You will be a strong advocate for the team and share practices, ideas and successes with other product delivery teams.
- You will provide technical leadership across workstream discussions, ensuring seamless collaboration where technical direction is required across multiple teams building applications over our platform.
- Working with Solution Architects and Developers, you will actively participate in brainstorming and solution design sessions to address the needs and technical challenges facing those teams. You will help drive the team to agreed outcomes and a technical way forward.
- Working with the Product team, you will be adept at solving business problems with software in the shortest sustainable lead-time and be able to explain technical solutions clearly and succinctly to business audiences and technical teams alike.
- Working with Architects and Engineering team, you will create the Technical Vision and Roadmap for the Platform Team, driving the focus on its objectives and progress against delivery.
- Ensuring team composition and skills are adequate, line management of your team of Engineering Leads, who will look to you as a mentor to develop their skills for regular 1:1s and as a coach to guide them through the software development lifecycle.
- Provide guidance to, and coach and mentor, the teams in modern web application software development practices, with specific focus on platform services engineering
- Publish, communicate, and maintain the technical vision and roadmap for the Dentsu.Connect Platform team
- Work with the Product team to ensure the user experience across Dentsu.Connect aligns to the Product vision and meets acceptance criteria
- Work with the Engineering team to ensure the platform services are scalable, resilient, well documented and easy to consume and to maintain.
- Collaborate with other Technology functions (e.g. Architecture, DevOps, Security) across different geographies, timezones and cultures to deliver secure, reliable, robust, scalable code which can be built, tested and deployed into Production using automation and CI/CD pipelines and Agile delivery practices.
- Lead the teams in best practice for good diagnostics, debugging, testing, deploying, and troubleshooting to drive quality and business value
- Work with Architecture to ensure solution design is reviewed effectively, and is conformant with NFRs, Security and Data Privacy guidelines
- Implement software engineering best practices with your peers within Engineering, such as, pair programming, clean code, CI /CD, pyramid testing within a Scrum agile delivery frame
- Proven experience managing small software teams and mentoring engineers in enterprise web development and services development using loosely coupled systems.
- Highly experienced in agile test driven software development
- Passionate about writing well-crafted clean code and comfortable working in an agile environment
- Ability to write high-quality code across modern Javascript based programming languages and frameworks
- Knowledge and experience of delivering solutions using a microservice architecture with RESTful protocols and frameworks such as Express, NestJS and GraphQL.
- Ability to quickly learn and apply emerging programming languages, frameworks, and platforms
- Knowledge and experience of implementing Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
- Knowledge and experience of hosting in cloud platforms such as Azure and AWS
- Working experience with Docker and/or Kubernetes
- Good communication and collaboration skills essential
- Good experience of working in a Microsoft Azure environment
- Extensive experience in building applications and web services in MERN (Mongo, Express, React, Node) using, Webpack, Typescript, GitHub (Experience with, Redis, Okta, OpenID a distinct advantage).
- Extensive experience of code quality, test, CI/CD and package managers such as Jest, Lint, Brigade and Helm
- Experience of Kafka, n8n and event driven architecture
- Experience of leading teams in delivering software and platform serives
- Good working knowledge of GraphQL APIs (federation using Wundergraph), ABAC solutions (Symphonic or equivalent), CMS platforms (Strapi or equivalent)
- Working knowledge of API gateways (Kong or equivalent), ABAC solutions (Symphonic or equivalent), CMS platforms (Strapi or equivalent)
- Working on Developer Portals or documentation relating to shared development services
- Experience of Docker and/or Kubernetes an advantage.
- Working knowledge of DataBricks/Spark (using Python and associated frameworks)
- Working knowledge of Azure Data Lake and Azure Blob storage