Technical Lead - Contract

Role Purpose

Leads the development for the squad. Owns the technical design for the squad’s stories, implements the harder ones, and reviews everything the squad’s developers produce. Reports to the Engineering Lead.

Key Responsibilities

1. Technical design

• Owns the technical design for the squad’s stories, produced in the Sprint preceding build: API contracts, data model changes, component structure and integration approach.
• Takes the design to the Solution Architect for endorsement before build is authorised.
• Escalates to the Solution Architect where a story implies an architecture or data model change, rather than resolving it locally.
• Attends the design walkthrough with the Business Analysts and raises what the functional design has not resolved.

1. Delivery

• Plans the squad’s build work for the Sprint and owns its delivery against the Sprint commitment.
• Implements stories to Definition of Done, and writes the unit and integration tests for their own code.
• Fixes defects raised in system test, SIT and UAT within the agreed turnaround.

1. Code review and team developmen t

• Reviews all code and technical design produced in the squad, and is accountable for what the squad ships.
• Educates the squad’s developers and brings new joiners up to speed on the platform.

1. Client engagement

• Presents at the Sprint review and at the technical review meeting.

1. AI-assisted development

• Uses AI coding tools as part of normal development: scaffolding, test generation, refactoring and investigating unfamiliar code.
• Reviews generated code before it is committed and is accountable for it as their own.

Experience and Qualifications

• 4–7 years in software engineering on enterprise Java with a modern front end.
• At least 2 of those years on an agile delivery working to a Sprint cadence, building from user stories rather than specifications.
• Has built and deployed on Government Commercial Cloud (GCC), working to the GCC landing zone and its account separation.
• Has shipped through SHIP-HATS or an equivalent government deployment pipeline.

Technical Skills

1. Core engineering

• Java 17+, Spring Boot, JPA and Hibernate
• ReactJS with Vite, TypeScript
• PostgreSQL, including query tuning
• REST API design
• Microservices and containerisation
• Flowable BPMN and DMN
• Git, Maven or Gradle, JUnit; CI/CD

1. Cloud and deployment

• GCC and AWS at a development level: VPC and account boundaries, IAM, secrets handling, CloudWatch
• SHIP-HATS pipeline