Data Tech Lead in Manchester

As a Tech Lead at ANS, you will be the “go to expert” in your technology field. You are empowered to make wide ranging and impactful technology decisions that you deliver against for ANS’ customers and products. You will be given the opportunity to work on a wide range of exciting projects, using the latest technologies and advancements, and lead a team of developers of varied experience levels. It's up to you how you split your time - you may spend around half of your time ‘on the tools’, cutting code, and reviewing peers and your team's work, and the rest building the profile of your products internally and externally.

The specialisms are:

• Digital - Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Low Code.
• Private Cloud - eCloud VPC, Sovereign Cloud, Commvault, Load Balancing v2, DRaaS, Colocation, SafeDNS.
• Public Cloud - Azure, AWS, Modern Data Platforms, AI/Machine Learning, and Modern Work (Nerdio & M365).
• Customer - Glass, ANS Portal, Learning Management System.
• Security - MDR, Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Cloudflare, Firewalls, SSLs.

It’s expected that there will be collaboration on certain technologies, both within the team and with other departments. E.g., Security and Public Cloud might work on Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender together.

What you’ll be doing...

• Develop new and improved products and services based on technologies within your domain and in response to customer and business requirements.
• Promote your thought processes and rationale behind decisions to the wider team.
• Work with technical product managers to gather low level requirements for products and solutions.
• Make reasoned, justifiable, research and evidence backed decisions.
• Create user stories that accurately describe requirements, convey valuable information to developers, and drive successful business outcomes.
• Perform any necessary technical discovery needed to understand business and customer problems and deliver successful solutions.
• Understand the business outcome, identify what technology is required to achieve that outcome, and any constraints that apply.
• Test the technical feasibility of proposed new products and solutions, with ultimate responsibility for architecting the product or solution.
• Deliver those products and solutions to a point where they add value to both ANS and our most importantly our customers.
• Document any products and solutions so they can be used and consumed by customers and any relevant internal users.
• Provide product or solution specific support, e.g., bugs. This does not include customer specific issues.
• Ensure products and solutions meet industry best practices, any internal ANS standards, and any regulatory compliance requirements.
• Ensure security risks are considered, identified, reduced, and mitigated when designing, developing, testing, and implementing new products & services.
• Act as a champion for the products and solutions within your domain, building trust. Evangelising on new and existing services.
• Represent your portfolio at the technical forums and steering committee with key stakeholders from the business.
• Keep up to date with new developments and services within your domain and determine if new services can be developed from these.
• Assign and track work to the developers and devops engineers you will be working to.
• Ensure adherence to company policies and procedures to maintain compliance and uphold organisational standards.

Soft skills required...

• Mentorship – assist in problem solving, working with team members to promote best practices.
• Collaboration skills – working with all stakeholders to understand project requirements and define technical requirements.
• Knowledge and experience in software development principles and methodologies.
• Understanding of data structures, algorithms, and object-oriented programming (OOP) concepts.
• Excellent problem-solving skills to analyse and resolve technical issues efficiently.
• Communication skills – be a confident and articulate speaker and an empathetic listener.
• Conduct thorough code reviews to ensure adherence to coding standards, best practices, and quality guidelines.

Experience, knowledge, and skills required...

• Minimum of 4+ years in within your technical domain and able to demonstrate capability to deliver high quality, well principled products quickly – even when under pressure.
• Demonstrable prior experience of leading, coaching or mentoring other team members.
• Considered an “expert” in your technology area (customer portals, public cloud, private cloud, security or digital).
• Excellent problem solving and analytical skills, with the ability to think critically and make informed decisions.
• Solid understanding of software development methodologies, best practices and coding standards.
• Be confident enough to say “I don’t know”; and passionate enough to do something about it.
• Take responsibility for your technical decision making but know when to delegate and help others take accountability.
• Know that done is better than perfect.

Qualifications required...

• A strong foundation in platforms, programming languages, frameworks, and tools relevant to the project or technology stack you're working with.
• You should be an expert and an advanced user in the core technologies used in the development process and have a deep understanding of software development principles and best practices.
• Expert and advanced experience in automation tools, scripting or programming languages, such as PHP, Python, Java, C++, JavaScript, Ruby, .Net, Terraform, ARM, CloudFormation as examples.
• Strong familiarity with web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and knowledge of web frameworks, such as Django, Ruby on Rails, or React, is also valuable.