Tech Lead

We bring together the best in strategic services, user experience and technical delivery using Lean and Agile processes.

Founded in 2010 by Stuart, Cain and David, we help large organisations improve their speed to market whilst focusing on delivering value to their users and customers. We work with our clients to understand their problems and validate ideas in order to deliver improved process efficiencies, strategic enhancements and new digital products and services (or make significant improvements to existing ones).

The best bit about Red Badger is, of course, the team. We’ve been around for 10+ years now and we are 120 strong. We are really proud of our people; we support and learn a lot from each other; we work really hard but have fun doing it. We are a diverse group made up of 22 different nationalities, speaking 17 different languages.

Our 3 founders have considerable tech and consultancy experience and still own the company. We’ve been consistently profitable and have grown responsibly from the beginning. We are embarking on the next phase of growth and development.

The role

We’re looking for a Tech Lead to join our digital product delivery function. Red Badger delivers high-quality digital products using a lean delivery process and multidisciplinary, cross-functional teams.

As a Tech Lead, you will work with one of our amazing Delivery Leads. Together, you will lead your team to deliver high quality software. The work we do for our clients involves dealing with the core complexities of their business and the technology we employ varies from project to project.

You love solving complex problems, and customer value is your north star. You are comfortable consulting with technology stakeholders outside of your team. You are a technology polyglot, and an evangelist for agile ways of working.

Day to day, you will spend roughly half of your time working on code, pairing with engineers on the team, reviewing their code and helping them pick the right design to solve the problem. In the other half, you’ll be supporting the other functions (delivery, product) and our clients with decisions impacted by the technical strategy of the project and providing support and line management to engineers on your team.

Key Responsibilities

Discipline Expertise and Leadership

Lead a team engineers as part of a cross functional delivery team

Employ modern development practices to ship high-quality software

Compare among different technical and design approaches, choosing the right technology for the job

Ability to adapt to new languages and frameworks

Start or continue your journey as a line-manager

Coach & support peers

Provide support for digital products once they are live (depending on client needs)

Agile Ways of Working

Run and contribute to agile ceremonies, helping to shape and improve the agile process

Work with the project’s delivery manager and product owner to lead the team in delivering high quality digital products

Lead and support your peers in technical conversations

Be an advocate for lean software development, building for what is required now

Pair programming with other members of the team, including designers

Consulting with clients

Own the relationship with the client’s technical stakeholders

Proactively engage with clients to shape and move the project forward, including giving updates on the delivery progress and highlighting potential technical blockers

Upskilling and embedding modern software practices in client teams where necessary

Your experience

It’d be great if you have experience with

Web frontend and backend technologies (e.g. Typescript, React, Node.JS, Rust, Go, etc.)

Relational and non-relational databases (e.g. ElasticSearch, Redis, PostgreSQL, etc.)

System architecture approaches (e.g. microservices, event sourcing, serverless, CQRS…)

Virtualisation and orchestration tools (e.g. VMs, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.) and infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform, Pulimi)

CI/CD pipelines (e.g Jenkins, CircleCI, Github Actions, etc.)

Test automation following Test Driven Development practices including unit testing, API testing, and end-to-end testing

Understanding design and technical trade-offs, optimising for lean product development and end-user value

Designing an agile release engineering strategy that delivers value incrementally and continuously

Supporting a highly-available live production system, responding to alerts, diagnosing problems using logs and observability tooling, triaging and resolving incidents

Working with lean and agile practices (e.g. Kanban, Scrum, etc.)

Collaborating in cross-functional teams

Coaching and line managing software engineers

It’d be amazing if you can also

Design, build, debug and help contribute to evolving cloud based architectures following Everything-as-Code principles

Negotiate SLAs and SLOs with the business and supporting teams

Help shaping and resourcing technical teams

Articulate commercial objectives into a technical strategy

Show a track record of owning the tech leadership on complex engineering projects, setting the technical vision for the project and managing technical stakeholders

Coach and line manage software engineers who are starting their line management journey

Be a part of the public face of the company in media and at meetups, conferences, etc.

What we offer

We make sure our team is well looked after with generous salaries and a great benefits package which includes:

Annual £2,000 training budget

Enhanced pension with employer contribution of up to 5% of your salary

Group Life Insurance

Income Replacement Benefit

Critical Illness Cover

Private Medical Insurance

Your choice of hardware and mobile phone

£1,000 home-office set up budget and contribution to home broadband

Matched (pre-tax) charity GAYE donations

Cycle to work

Enhanced parental leave.

Our core working hours are 10am-3pm to allow you flexibility to plan your work around your personal commitments.

Red Badger Values:

People people

We respect and care for each other, giving us the space to feel safe and be our true selves

Find a way

We’re comfortable with uncertainty and accountability, whilst achieving great outcomes through shared goals

Always learning

We’re curious. It’s how we learn and grow as individuals, continuously testing and improving what we do, and how we do it

Open & Fair

We build trust by telling things as they are, being open, and seeking to achieve fair and equitable outcomes.

Collaborative

We are united by our desire to get to the best ideas. We are generous with our knowledge, actively listen to each other, and are open minded.

Diversity & Inclusion:

Red Badger is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment, and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We hire, employ, train, promote and compensate regardless of gender, gender identity, race, disability, sexual orientation, age, creed and colour. We are fully focused on equality, and it is our fundamental belief that the fascinating characteristics that make us all different enable us to continue to do amazing work for our clients.