Senior Tech Lead - GoCompare

About the Team

We are Future, a global multi-platform media company with big ambitions and the talent to bring them to life. Together, we connect people to their passions through the high-quality content we create and the innovative technology we pioneer.

We’re the name behind award-winning brands in specialist sectors like technology, gaming & entertainment, music, creative & photography, field sports, knowledge and home interest. Specialists in our field and passionate about what we do, every year we attract millions of consumers to our websites, magazines, events and social spaces.

Future’s Technology department has been instrumental in the company’s success over recent years and is vital to Future’s continued growth and disruption of the digital publishing industry.

As part of the strategy around GoComapre’s acquisition by Future we’re putting in a technology roadmap for re-platforming our domain around an API first, cloud based serverless architecture to become the PCW leading service. This is part of our plan to broaden the scope from the GoCompare brand.

Job Purpose

As Senior Tech Lead, you will be part of the senior engineering leadership team. Your focus will be on leading a team of engineers and working within the wider engineering team to drive the technical direction of the platform.

In this role Tech Leads and Senior Engineers will look to your experience and detailed product knowledge to progress our re-platforming in a meaningful and quantifiable way.

In this role you will be jointly responsible for the direction of the architecture, software delivery and leadership of the team. You will be influential in the wider team decision making for resolving technical debt & solution delivery.

You will set requirements which determine the technical specification of new features and services, as well as ensure that the team consistently maintain and improve the existing codebase. You will ensure that Tech Leads and Senior Engineers make changes that are scalable, tested, and well structured in line with industry best practices.

Working closely with Engineering, Product, UX, QA and Project Management (PMO) teams you will ensure that all applications integrate reliably. You will also be expected to lead & mentor Tech Leads, Junior, Mid and Senior Engineers contributing to their growth, knowledge, and reviewing their code.

In this role your time will be predominantly scoping, meeting and guiding your teams. The role will be split 80:20, where there is an expectation that for 20% of your time you are able to be hands-on, contributing to the re-platforming of our service.

You will be responsible for delegating tasks and working with other Tech Leads & Senior Tech Leads / Directors of Engineering to ensure that the business / tech priorities are respected.

Key Responsibilities

• In collaboration with other Senior Tech Leads, Tech Leads and Engineers you will ensure your team’s code is well scoped, monitored, documented and testable.
• You will be responsible for the code quality of your teams, ensuring that the code is maintainable and extensible.
• You will lead on tracing bugs across the stack and ensuring that suitable tests are set up to avoid future regressions. And work closely with QA to ensure the risk of future occurrences is reduced.
• You will work to guide your teams in how to review both their own code and other developers’ before it goes through a final QA process and into production.
• You will ensure that your team members are working efficiently and delivering to the best of their ability.
• You will communicate effectively with the wider business and be able to critically assess product requirements and solutions.
• You will keep up to date with the latest approaches to development and be able to argue for appropriate technology to be added to the stack.
• You will participate in regular hack days, using cutting edge tech to prototype innovative approaches to business/technical goals.
• As the senior tech lead you are required to support and help develop more junior members of staff both via code review/direction and mentoring.
• You will nurture the professional development of your team members through regular 1:1s, coaching and supporting their career development.
• You will line manage Tech Lead(s) and will ultimately be responsible for the underlying teams under the direction of the Tech Lead(s) within your remit.