Head of Development - Remote

About the Job:
We are growing rapidly at Zyte with an ever increasing demand for our Products and Services. This is a position within our Delivery team in recognition of the importance of focusing on our truly excellent team of Python developers who are at the heart of what we do.

We are looking for a Technical leader with experience of building and developing great development teams on a global basis. This individual will be required to bring technical mentorship, create a culture of engineering excellence whilst building the organisation structure and career development strategies to underpin this objective.

The successful candidate will be a strong communicator and motivator of people, ensuring that the Development team within the Delivery function at Zyte is a unified and cohesive group who deliver excellent outcomes for our customers using our best-in-class Products. The development and continuous improvement of best practices and standards is a key objective of this role.

This is a senior technical leadership position reporting to the Head of Delivery &Operations (an SLT position).

Job Responsibilities:

This individual will have the following as core responsibilities of the position, organisation across three main areas:

Technical Leadership

• Bring Technical leadership and mentoring to the team, driving a ‘standards’agenda for Delivery including development standards, code reviews, code release standards etc - all with the objective of bringing great consistency and repeatability to project delivery.
• Responsible for Technical governance on projects - define and roll out of a set of practices that Technical/Project Leads adhere to and follow to identify technical risks early and apply the appropriate remedies (or bring in additional assistance) and reviews to resolve these.
• Work with our Solution Architecture (Pre-Sales) team on new project estimation to ensure that estimates are reviewed and acting as a sign-off on non-standard or higher risk engagements. Ensuring we have a good feedback loop in place to ensure learnings from projects are factored into future estimates techniques.
• Guide our open source contributions, a fundamental part of our DNA at Zyte.
• Define and own a set of Technical KPIs which inform how well the development team is performing.
• Act as a point of escalation both internally for Project Managers or Project Tech Leads if technical issues arise on their projects, and externally with customers on technical manners.

Technical Organisation

• Responsible for all Developers within the Delivery team from a line management perspective. All Development and Technical Leads will report to this role.
• Continuous focus on organisation optimisation through definition of the team structure, icomposition, location, competencies and profile mix. Working closely with the Head of Delivery and HR on strategies to achieve this.
• Drive training and career development initiatives within the team with the support of HR and other 3rd party Training partners. Ensure that each developer has a career development plan and is regularly reviewed as part of overall performance management.

Part of a Delivery Management team

• Represent the Delivery organisation at our internal Product Steering ensuring that requirements for Zyte products are prioritised appropriately.
• Participate and contribute to an overall Delivery Management team.
• Work closely with peers within Delivery (Heads of PMO, QA, Data &Maintenance) and Sales to ensure an integrated approach to capacity planning based on current and future pipeline of projects.

Job Requirements

• A degree in Computer Science or equivalent - information technology, management information systems, software engineering and networking.
• At least 10 years’experience in software development with at least 4-5 years of those managing developer / development teams.
• Thorough understanding of web technologies - HTML, CSS, Javascript (mandatory) as well as experience / knowledge in following technologies (desirable)
  • Writing code in any of the following language - Python, Javascript, Java, C++, Go
  • Front-end web app frameworks - Angular, Vue, React
  • Databases - MySQL, Postgresql, Mongodb
  • Understanding of software architectural design/patterns
  • Knowledge of kafka or rabbitMQ
  • Knowledge of GC or AWS
  • Data engineering background is a big plus
• Experience of running a distributed team and working in a remote-working environment would be a benefit.
• Experience in a customer-facing role would be important.
• Experience in presenting ideas, influencing, and building consensus with peer and senior audiences.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to communicate at both technical and senior levels.
• Fast learner with good problem solving skills