Tech Lead/Lead Developer

Snook are seeking a Tech Lead to join our London studio (open to other working arrangements).

Salary: £60k – £75k
Location: London. Snook would prefer that the candidate be able to work predominantly with the rest of the team in the London office, but we are always receptive to flexible working patterns and candidates should not consider this a barrier to applying for this role.
Full time 37.5 hours
Rolling recruitment
Please note: This role requires Security Clearance and applicants will need to have been resident in the UK for the past three years.

About the company
Snook are on a mission to design a world that works better for people.

We work with organisations to design more effective services which help people thrive. We do this by engaging with users, building digital products, training our clients, and much more.

This year we’re ten years old. In the past five years, we’ve scaled to more than double our original size when we started up in Scotland. We’ve opened a London office and our team is approaching 40 people. And we’ve worked with brilliant clients — from Cancer Research UK and Tesco to Hackney City Council and the Scottish Government.

About the role
As a Tech Lead at Snook, you will work alongside our other tech leads to assist in the day-to-day running of the development work within our digital design team, and provide oversight of their technical delivery.

You will work with the team to develop digital products and services, making the best use of budget to provide value for our clients and to our internal projects.

You will help create a strong team ethic and foster a culture of partnership, consistent delivery, operational excellence and continuous improvement. You will foster strong engineering practices, team dynamics and delivery. You will have experience of user centered design and delivery and foster a good working relationship between UI/UX staff and the rest of the build team.

Our Tech Leads will report to the Head of Digital and will collaborate across our user-centered disciplines, including service design, user research, operations and comms.

Requirements
You should be able to demonstrate that you are able to meet some, or all, of the following requirements:

Lead multidisciplinary project teams to develop and test digital products, proof of concepts and prototypes.
Able to drive technical direction in projects and assure they meet accessibility, scalability, robustness and security requirements.
Coach and identify appropriate training and development opportunities for junior members of the Digital Design team.
Work with the Head of Digital and the Head of Design in developing the design culture within Snook.
Ensure client satisfaction in the delivery of our technical solutions; that they are on time and budget.
Be an inspirational developer and foster a culture of proactive open communication, operational excellence, and consistent delivery.
Line-manage the team of developers. Provide mentoring and support to build individual and team capability.
Develop, test, deploy and improve digital products and services in production.
Build awareness and understanding of technical possibilities and constraints within our team and with our clients.
Develop our technology practices including test-driven development, code review, pair-programming, QA, approaches and professional development and training.
Build internal products and services to help us to work more effectively and launch new ventures.
Help the wider team at Snook to develop an understanding of the possibility of technology and data as appropriate to ensure our wider product and service solutions are fit for purpose.
Support the wider Snook team on new business proposals and pitches when required.
Your skills and experience
We’re keen to hear from a range of applicants who can demonstrate some, or all, of the following skills and experience:

Experience leading the technical vision for products and services within a development team.
A strong portfolio of building accessible and inclusive live digital products and/or services.
An understanding of service design methods.
Experience of skillfully translating and communicating technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders.
A working knowledge of accessibility best practice.
Experience with at least two programming languages: Python, JavaScript (Node.js), Go, Ruby.
Experience of collaborating with digital designers to take a service live.
Experience working with front-end frameworks (React, Vue.js) and design patterns (MVC, MVVM, Flux, etc.) and understanding of their benefits and constraints.
Experience working with databases (SQL and NoSQL).
Experience with containerised services and orchestration.
Experience working with agile and lean approaches to product development.
Skilled in translating product requirements and user needs into human-readable, well-documented code that is easy to maintain and evolve.
Awareness of technology trends and an openness to experimentation.
Strong working knowledge of Git version control and CI/CD.
Experience with deploying, hosting, securing, monitoring and scaling in the cloud and experience with configuration management tools (like Terraform, Chef, Ansible, Puppet, KMS, etc.).
Practical experience with test-driven development (TDD) and/or behaviour-driven development (BDD).
Experience of pair-programming and code review, willing to work collaboratively to both give and receive feedback within a shared code ownership team.
Experience and knowledge of accessible practice or when to call on deep expertise.
Experience of mentoring and coaching other developers.
What we offer
Snook offer a competitive salary, 29.5 holidays per year (including public holidays), additional annual Christmas closure and a supportive maternity leave policy.

We provide an annual training budget for external opportunities from talks and conferences to more bespoke hands-on training.

We respect that people have commitments and provide flexible working hours through discussion.

We have an annual team-away retreat for us to come together as a company, taking time out to learn, reflect, and eat snacks.

We spend a Friday together every quarter as one studio to run show and tells.

Every Monday morning, we have a team breakfast where we eat together and share our ambitions for the week ahead.

We are an equal opportunity, Disability Confident and Living Wage Foundation employer.

We have a bike to work scheme and free membership to HeadSpace the mental health app.

We support you with a Snook buddy when you join to get you started.

We strive for diversity in our team. If we’re going to design services for the public we need to ensure our team is inclusive. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and ages, however all applicants must have the right to work in the UK.

How to apply
This is a rolling recruitment campaign so please don’t wait to submit your application. We are sifting and interviewing candidates on a weekly basis.

Please submit a CV, cover letter and your notice period.

Send your CV and cover letter pdfs to ‘apply-f0fe13d0220301@snook-ltd.breezy-mail.com’ with the title “Hire me: Tech Lead”.

In your covering letter, please tell us a little bit about yourself, why you want to work at Snook and what sort of design problems you’d be interested in tackling with us.

Due to the current Covid-19 epidemic, we anticipate that all interviews will be conducted remotely. We will offer interviews at times that suit you, so if you have children, caring duties, or other circumstances affecting your availability for an interview, we’re happy to offer convenient times outside of work hours.