Applications Development Manager

Job Title Applications Development Manager

Location: Home-based with occasional travel

Salary: To circa £70,000 (£76,000 inside M25) + benefits

Job Purpose

Lead the design, build, test and maintenance of application services, ensuring the delivered services meet business requirements and user needs.
Collaborate with partners across functions to ensure solutions adhere to architectural principles, industry best practice, and meet the desired outcomes of the customers.
Manage and develop the Software Engineering capability by providing technical leadership for the in-house team and external suppliers.
Contribute to business case development, articulating benefits and return on investment. Ensure solutions delivered to time, cost and quality requirements.

Accountabilities

• Management of software engineering capability to produce services efficiently and effectively.
• Utilise modern standards approach through automation and testing. Take responsibility for coaching and guiding others.
• Design, create, test and document new and amended software components from supplied specifications in accordance with agreed development and security standards and processes.
  The specification and design of information systems to meet defined business needs. The identification of concepts and their translation into implementation design. The design or selection of components.
• The incremental and logical integration and testing of components or subsystems and their interfaces in order to create operational services.
• Coordinate build activities across systems and undertake and support integration testing activities.
• Translate user stories and propose design approaches or services to meet user needs and engage in meaningful interactions and relationships with users.
• Define, analyse, plan, measure, maintain and improve all aspects of the availability of services.
• Control and manage service availability to meet the needs of the business in a cost effective manner, including managing the capability, functionality and sustainability of service components (including hardware, software, network resources and software/infrastructure as a service).
• Maintain the security, confidentiality and integrity of information systems through the compliance with relevant legislation and regulations. Articulate risks and explore options and solutions for mitigation. Design, implement and operate controls and management strategies to allow this.
• Apply technical knowledge and experience to oversee the creation of workable prototypes.
• Set team-based standards for programming tools and techniques and select appropriate development methods. Advise on the application of standards and methods and ensure compliance.
• Take technical responsibility for all stages and/or iterations in a software development project, providing method-specific technical advice and guidance to project stakeholders.
• Oversee the execution and reporting of tests, ensuring appropriate tools and techniques are utilised. Manage the implementation of suitable testing including but not limited to BDD, TDD, Unit Testing, System Testing, Integration Testing and Load/Stress testing.
• Learn from what has worked as well as what has not, being open to change and improvement and working in ‘smarter’, more focussed ways.
• Log, analyse and manage problems in order to identify and implement the appropriate solution. Ensure that problems are fixed according to SLA’s or in a timely manner providing proactive communication.
• Working collaboratively, sharing information appropriately and building supportive, trusting and professional relationships with colleagues and a wide range of people within and outside of the organisation.
• Effectively plan, organise and manage team & supplier activities to deliver high quality, secure, reliable and efficient services, and applying project and risk management approaches to support service delivery.
• Line management, coaching and mentoring of a team of senior software engineers. Setting and measuring team objectives against strategic goals and organisational priorities.

Specific skills and experience

• Educated to degree-level, professional qualification or equivalent experience.
• Demonstrable experience managing highly skilled Software Engineers working in a DevOps fashion with QA Engineers and DevOps Engineers including mentoring and driving best practice.
• Strong technical background in software engineering, with hands-on experience in DevOps tooling and techniques.
• Experienced driving efficiencies, through automation and process design and implementation in particular in the automation of application deployment methodologies.
• Experience of building and optimising deployment pipelines and deployment strategies on popular CI/CD tools such as Jenkins.
• Experience delivering Application Lifecycle Management of D365 & Power Platform, and .Net Applications inclusive of any services in Azure such as logic apps, function apps etc.
• Experience with design, development, test and maintenance of software and web applications.
• Experience in at least one Object Oriented programming language e.g. Java or C#.Net.
• An appreciation of modern web application techniques, such as integrating modern JavaScript frameworks into applications.
• Experience of modern JavaScript frameworks such as React or Angular.
• Good all-round web development experience, including awareness of best practices and standards such as accessibility, usability and web standards
• Experience of leading agile teams and working in an agile manner.
• Experience of delivering web solutions in an integrated environment, with an understanding of how to optimize solutions to gain performance and stability
• Knowledge and experience of software engineering best practice including test driven development and the use version control software such as GitHub and Azure DevOps.
• Experience of Agile tools and processes e.g. Azure DevOps
• Experience of Azure Identity and Access Management
• Experience of Azure Integration Services.