Principal Software Engineer

As featured in the likes of The Telegraph, Independent and Forbes, Patchwork is an award-winning digital healthcare solution that was built by doctors, for doctors. We are a rapidly growing team of 100+ people revolutionising flexible working in the NHS and are helping NHS organisations save millions (and counting), by connecting them to an increasing number of flexible bank workers. We help grow their staff banks, remove reliance and spending on locum agencies, and aim to improve the general experience of flexible bank working. We have always taken pride in having a hybrid working model even before the pandemic. Despite not being a fully remote employer, we are a flexible employer and encourage all of our employees to come into the office twice a week.

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join our growing and passionate Technology Team. Technology at Patchwork is responsible for all activities related to the development and maintenance of the platforms we build. This role will play a crucial part in decisions and design choices, and in building, implementing, and maintaining our software solutions. We are looking for an experienced Software Engineer to help us migrate our code and culture towards a truly agile environment, with a focus on scalability and feature enablement.

Key Responsibilities

• Providing technical leadership and guidance to the wider Technology Team.
• Being a leader in defining technical strategies and solutions and embedding good practices.
• This role is a leadership position, the role holder is responsible for the development, nurturing, and output of their team and is expected to uphold Patchwork’s standards of excellence.
• Designing and reviewing software architectures for scalability, performance, and maintainability and making technically and contextually informed decisions about technology stack, frameworks, and tools.
• Writing high-quality, clean, and efficient code, developing complex modules and components as needed.
• Leading by example in terms of coding standards, best practices, and design patterns; working collaboratively to embed throughout the Technology Team.
• Tackling complex technical challenges and providing innovative solutions, troubleshooting existing codebases and proposing improvements.
• Collaborating cross-departmentally to gather requirements, define project scope, and ensure successful project delivery.
• Communicating effectively with non-technical stakeholders to explain technical concepts and decisions, specifically working closely with Product, building an effective and open relationship.
• Ensuring code quality through testing, code reviews, and continuous integration practices, setting high standards for unit testing, integration testing, and code coverage.
• Project management, such as assisting in planning, estimation, and prioritisation, and providing technical insights to help manage risks and mitigate potential roadblocks.
• Creating and maintaining technical documentation and upholding good standards of technical documentation within the Technology Team.
• Keep up with industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices.
• Evaluate new tools, technologies, and methodologies to drive continuous improvement.

Requirements

• Demonstrable experience working with agile processes (e.g. pair-programming and TDD) and a history of building a culture suited to fast scaling organisations.
• Proven experience of overseeing a team including coaching and line leadership.
• Proven strategies for identifying, managing, and reducing technical debt.
• Demonstrable experience in architectural decision-making, and in extracting services from a monolith.
• Ability to build infrastructure (i.e., AWS, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD toolchain optimisation).
• Proven polyglot, including at least one of: JVM/Kotlin, Typescript, or Ruby.
• Capable of working full stack.
• Experience owning delivery of atomic features to actual users.
• Strong automated testing practices and quality-focused delivery.
• Eagerness to work with multiple people and be a self-starter.
• Prideful in attention to detail.
• Ability and passion to work in a fast-paced scale-up team environment, embracing its challenges and opportunities.

Nice to Have

• Experience mentoring squad leaders.
• Experience in a tech start-up/scale-up.
• Experience or knowledge of the NHS, healthcare, or healthtech industry.
• Experience or knowledge of workforce applications.
• Qualifications in a related field i.e., Computer Science or Software Engineering.