Lead Software Engineer in Manchester

About Made Tech: Our aim at Made Tech is to use human‑centred technology to improve our society. We believe putting people at the heart of designing, building and delivering public services leads to better outcomes for everyone. Are you a Software Engineer that wants to actually see the real‑world impact from what you help to create? Our mission is simple! We believe we can use tech to make public services better. We also believe this can happen best when our own team represents the society that actually uses the services we work on. At Made Tech, we’re collectively continuing to grow a culture that is happy, healthy, safe and inspiring for people of all backgrounds and experiences, so we encourage all people from underrepresented groups to apply for roles with us.

We are looking for Lead Engineers with a particular penchant and love for cloud, automation, slick tooling, and empowering software delivery by coaching teams in true DevOps fashion. While we are looking for those with significant experience working with AWS, this role remains a full stack and polyglot role as with all of our Software Engineering roles. Our Lead Software Engineers are Tech Leads, Architects, Thought Leaders, Full Stack Engineers, and Consultants. They are our most senior technologist within a customer account representing Made Tech and act as a hands‑on CTO across one or more software delivery teams driving organisational change and outcomes for users. They combine technical excellence, drive to deliver, and coaching, to achieve outcomes for our customers and their users, and to establish strong engineering cultures within our customers' organisations. They find themselves working on a variety of different problems from monoliths to microservices, upskilling colleagues and customers, always learning from others, while constantly striving to be nice humans.

Key responsibilities

We primarily write and deliver custom software for the public sector. We work across central and local government, as well as in health, and our past lies in the technology startup world. Technical excellence for us isn’t about delivering to feature lists. We place a strong emphasis on outcome‑based delivery; ensuring our customers' goals are understood and achieved with the technology we deploy. High performing software delivery teams need to be empowered to iteratively and rapidly deliver changes all the way through to production. To do this we combine our extensive cloud automation knowledge with DevOps culture. We ensure we document our architecture and infrastructure as code, using technologies such as Terraform and OpenAPI. Containerisation is a big part of empowering our teams to develop, deploy and scale their applications, but so too is using AWS Lambda and avoiding the complexity of stateful services altogether. Right tool for the job. For us, DevOps is about culture rather than roles and titles. Even though this role is for someone with strong DevOps experience, the biggest impact you will have is coaching and helping teams use the platforms you build. You won’t be building infrastructure in isolation or charged with deploying other people’s work into production. You’ll empower teams with the mantra: you build it, you run it!

Our teams have used Java, Ruby, Python, ES6 with React, C# with .NET Core. We don’t limit ourselves as a company and we expect all our Engineers to be keen on learning new technologies. Automation is important to our teams, so we make sure there is a CD pipeline set up to build, test, and release many times per day. We grow a team of language agnostic engineers, which you might already consider yourself to be, who are versed in a mix of paradigms such as object oriented, functional, declarative, event-based and aspect-oriented. To create this environment our Senior Engineers need to embrace sharing their knowledge and skills with others, and they need to keep an open mind – we’d love to hear some examples of mentoring, coaching and growing team members. Maybe you will have written some blog posts about your discipline, or perhaps even delivered a talk or two.

Skills, knowledge and expertise

Essential Skills

• Written code with tests
• Delivery in an agile environment
• Worked across a variety of programming languages
• Worked with databases
• Worked with APIs
• Worked with at least one Cloud platform
• Debugging experience in a range of systems
• Evidence of self‑development - we value keen learners
• Drive to deliver outcomes for users
• Desire to mentor others

Nice to Haves

• Consultancy experience
• Working directly with customers and users
• Working within multidisciplinary teams with product, design, and technology working within the same cycles
• Showcasing and presentation skills
• Agile practices such as Scrum, XP, and/or Kanban
• Pair programming - we pair around 50% of the time
• Writing code with test‑driven development
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines
• Component‑based design techniques such as using pattern libraries, styled‑components, CSS‑in‑JS, BEM, and/or SUIT CSS
• Debugging infrastructure
• The REACT ecosystem including a test‑driven approach
• Infrastructure as code technology like Terraform and Cloud Formation
• Familiarity with architectural and design patterns
• Use of architectural design records

Please note, an increasing number of our customers are specifying a minimum of SC (security check) clearance in order to work on their projects. As a result, we’re looking for all successful candidates for this role to have eligibility. Eligibility for SC requires 5 years’ continuous UK residency and 5 year’s employment history (or back to full‑time education). Please note that if at any point during the interview process it is apparent that you may not be eligible for SC, we won’t be able to progress your application and we will contact you to let you know why.

Job benefits

At this point, we hope you’re feeling excited about Made Tech and the job opportunity. Even if you don't feel that you meet every single requirement, we still encourage you to apply. Get in touch with our talent team if you’d like an informal chat about the role and your suitability before applying. We are hiring for this role directly, so will not respond to any CVs sent via external recruitment agencies.

We’re committed to building a happy, inclusive and diverse workforce. You can get a sense of what it’s like working here from our blog, where we talk about mental health, communities of practice and neurodiversity (as well as our client work and best practice). Like many organisations, we use Slack to foster a sense of community and connection. As well as special interest groups such as music, food and pets, we also have 10+ Slack channels dedicated to specific communities, allies, and identities as well as dedicated learning spaces called communities of practice (COPs). If you’d like to speak to someone from one of these groups about their experience as an employee, please do let a member of the Made Tech talent team know.

Benefits

We are always listening to our growing teams and evolving the benefits available to our people. As we scale, as do our benefits and we are scaling quickly. We’ve recently introduced a flexible benefit platform which includes a Smart Tech scheme, Cycle to work scheme, and an individual benefits allowance which you can invest in a Health care cash plan or Pension plan. We’re also big on connection and have an optional social and wellbeing calendar of events for all employees to join should they choose to.

• 30 days Holiday - we offer 30 days of paid annual leave plus bank holidays
• Flexible Working Hours - we are flexible with what hours you work
• Flexible Parental Leave - we offer flexible parental leave options
• Remote Working - we offer part time remote working for all our staff
• Paid counselling - we offer paid counselling as well as financial and legal advice