Senior Development Manager at Prodigy Finance

What will you do in the role?

• You will be responsible for an entire vertical in the Prodigy domain model. This means that you will work with various business stakeholders and Product to determine goals and metrics within these domains.
• You will also be leading a number of Software Engineers across multiple teams who shall report directly to you and you will fulfill all line management duties and responsibilities. The focus is on supporting their career development, providing coaching and mentoring, and assisting them and their teams with removing impediments and resolving issues in collaboration with other Software Development Managers.
• You will work closely with the Product Managers and teams to help set OKRs for specific areas and support teams reporting into you to achieve them. You will also contribute towards the growth of the Technology Team by assisting with the hiring and onboarding of new Software Engineers.

What are the key responsibilities of the role?

• Lead and manage Software Engineers ranging from graduate to senior level experience.
• Support the career development of Software Engineers through training, coaching and mentoring.
• Coach, mentor and partner with Team Leads within the domain you are responsible for.
• Provide regular, in-the-moment feedback to Software Engineers and teach them how to provide the same feedback to others in order to foster a culture of continuous feedback, trust and transparency so that we can all become better at what we do.
• Set goals and targets for domains and ensure teams are adequately staffed and have the necessary resources to achieve them.
• Contribute to and help teams work towards the long term technical roadmap for the domain you are responsible for.
• Assist with the hiring and onboarding of new Software Engineers to help grow the Technology Team in order for us to continue to scale and support the wider organisation’s needs.
• Enable Software Engineers to work effectively and be set up for success in our Agile environment.
• Define and report on metrics for teams reporting to you.
• Ensure that the right set of (light weight) processes are defined and followed to ensure the efficient and rapid creation of quality products with supportable code.
• Contribute to defining technical, security and development standards for teams.
• Ensure technical, security and development standards are followed within teams.
• Grow an understanding and appreciation of Agile in our teams and our organisation.
• Partner with a Product Manager to define and communicate priorities within your domain and ensure that staffing and efforts in the team are adjusted to those priorities.
• Work with other senior staff to ensure the products the team delivers are built with solid, reliable, supportable technologies, with appropriate architecture.
• Partner with the rest of the business to help provide technical advice and direction to allow the business to achieve its goals.
• Engage the company on how to understand our technology capability better and support processes that help the organisation better understand software engineering practices.
• Facilitate inter-team and cross-team problem solving, collaboration and decision making where needed.
• Grow and enhance our learning culture which includes hackathons, code katas, multiple guilds and temporary working groups.
• Play a leading role in helping us to achieve our mission to develop a professional software engineering team and to support the needs of the wider organisation’s understanding of technology.

What would the ideal candidate be great at?

• Technical acumen; fluency in great software engineering practices.
• Leadership; leading and managing Software Engineers. Earn respect as an insightful mentor and coach.
• Growing an amazing team; ensure the team grows in skill and size, and remains supported as we scale. Grow our learning culture to enable Software Engineers to be the best that they can be.
• Disciplined execution; helping all teams within a domain set and achieve overall OKRs.
• Critical judgement; facilitate great decisions, flag issues early, evaluate and solve problems with the team, communicate strategic and tactical priorities, be a sounding-board for team members.
• Ability to partner with multiple stakeholders across an entire domain to deliver business value.
• Value creation; the teams in a specific domain’s ability to deliver maximum business value.

Qualifications and experience

• Experienced in managing multiple Software Engineering teams
• Strong team management, communication, organisational, and follow-up skills
• Growing and mentoring Software Engineers
• Creating and fostering a learning culture
• Have been a Software Engineer in the past, understand software development processes and know what great software development practices are and how to implement them
• Strong facilitation, collaboration and negotiation skills
• Agile experience

Experience that would be nice to have (but we’ll trade off if everything else fits)

• Strong technical background - ability to hold your own with senior Software Engineers
• Experience in a object-oriented scripting language such as Ruby, Python or PHP, and knowledge of design patterns and algorithms
• Experience with distributed systems and services architectures and associated paradigms and technology stacks
• Experience working with a relational database, for example PostgreSQL
• Experience with open source tools, including github, Jenkins, and others
• Experience of cloud platform such as AWS, Azure or GCP