Development Team Lead

My Dublin based client is recruiting for a Development Team Lead to join the team on a permanent basis.

Job Responsibilities 

• Someone with team leadership and scrum master experience, who can manage the work of a team of developers using an agile methodology.
• Someone intelligent, inquisitive and imaginative who can help get the best out of our team (encouraging them to try different things and extend their skills) but who balances this with the discipline needed to deliver practical solutions.
• Someone who can get on with people, and who has good communications and organisational skills; who can work closely with the delivery managers and our clients to deliver high quality code.

Experience Required

• For this role, we’re thinking you’ll have at least 3 years’ experience of team leadership and /or scrum master or equivalent.
• As a development team lead you would be responsible for:
• Ensuring that the team’s software development process works effectively, reporting progress to Delivery Managers, the Product Owner and CTO to keep everyone in the loop
• Ensuring the software produced by the team achieves the expected quality
• Managing and organizing the work of the team, coordinating people to work effectively on features together
• Planning and supporting each sprint, including running standups and ensuring we use Jira properly
• Discussing technical problems that the dev team are experiencing during development and help resolve them. Where problems can’t be resolved immediately you should ensure they are tracked and raised with the relevant team members.
• Planning, prioritisation and resourcing (working with the CTO on the more strategic issues, and with the team on more practical things)

Essential and Desirable Skills

• Software Development Lifecycle including, but not limited to, agile software development methodology (Scrum or Kanban).
• To be able to support out team in learning new tools, keeping up to date with the latest libraries, frameworks and languages and working with the CTO to incorporate all of this into our design and development methodology.
• A working knowledge of programming in order to be able to understand the development team at a technical level.  We’ve pulled together a list of the areas that the team cover.
• The ability to quickly research and learn new programming tools and techniques;
• The ability to explain technical concepts to a non-technical audience.
• Java/J2EE;
• Spring (Framework/IOC, Spring Data JPA, Spring-MVC);
• JPA/Hibernate;
• RESTful Web Services;
• Angular;
• Maven;
• Unit testing with JUnit and mock objects (mockito or similar);
• Demonstrable ability to develop efficient, highly optimised and clear code;
• The ability to quickly research and learn new programming tools and techniques;
• The ability to explain technical concepts to a non-technical audience.

Supporting Info – Detailed list of responsibilities

• Team Management
• Assign work to the team, liaising with the CTO to agree general approach
• Manage leave, timesheets and WTF requests
• Run weekly 1-1s
• Support monthly review meetings with the team
• Make sure people are OK from a “pastoral” perspective and that they have the right equipment and so on
• Embed ways of working across the team

Planning and prioritisation

• Support the CTO with future planning.  Pre-analyse issues coming up for the next sprint and talk these through with devs
• Support the CTO in designing and applying a suitable prioritisation process
• Support the CTO with roadmap planning for the platform and across projects (sprints – projects – platform)
• Flag issues to the CTO

Start of Sprint

• Work out resource estimation numbers and use these to carry out sprint resource planning, taking into account things like holidays, and velocity for team and individuals
• Review the Sprint contents against the roadmap
• Explain the sprint to the dev team – Sprint goal, key sprint tasks etc
• Assign time-tracking estimates (previously story points) to individual tasks
• Help to prepare/disseminate technical analysis of sprint tasks
• Create tasks and sub-tasks in Jira – help to articulate user stories in the sprint planning session, create tasks or stubs for the CTO or one of the developers to develop into fuller tasks
• Ensure that sub-tasks are created so that we capture everything that needs to be done

Continuous (Mid-Sprint) Activities

• Facilitate the dev team’s daily stand-up
• Maintain the Kanban board (ensuring that devs are keeping the board up-to-date effectively).  Get the devs to record status
• Track progress throughout the sprint to make sure that the team are on-track for delivery
• Flag, track & mitigate risks as they emerge.  Review velocity (which will change and evolve all the time)
• Work out where any problems or delays might be occurring
• Divert, reassign work as necessary

Release Management

• Work with the test manager and delivery manager to agree releases to QA & UAT
• Ensure builds are ready for release
• Prepare Release note for devops team
• Ensure Jira Release version is up to date with all issues in the release

Quality Management

• Ensure Code Reviews are completed to a high standard
• Lead the Defect Management process – run defect review board with testers each week. Triage defects reported by the test team, assign to developers and ensure status of all jira issues is up to date.  Have good quality conversation with developers about defects and continuous improvements and refinements
• Ensure nightly builds are successful and assign issues to developers if not
• Manage the automation developer’s work

End of Sprint

• Write up Sprint output
• Close down of Sprint via Jira (returning issues to the backlog, splitting issues up if functionality part-delivered, ensuring that all time has been accurately tracked)
• Prepare for the development show & tell.
• Produce burndown report production
• Produce Post-Sprint report production
• Facilitate dev team retrospective

We also work with:

• Grails;
• Apache Velocity;
• Apache Shiro;
• Spring (Spring Batch, Spring Boot);
• Elasticsearch and Kibana;
• RDBMS design and development experience, including MSSQL and MySQL;
• Experience of J2EE application servers: Tomcat, JBoss, Weblogic or Websphere;
• GIT or SVN;
• HTML / CSS / jQuery;
• Test automation (Selenium., Cucumber, Selenide).

Educational Requirements

• Computer Science Degree required

Working Hours / Benefits

• 40 Hour working week
• Annual Leave
• Flexi Time