Operations Director & Lead Developer — Wonderful Organisation

Content; Manchester; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Content seeks an Operations Director & Lead Developer to oversee the Wonderful fundraising platform's operations and development. This role involves the responsible management of technical and operational aspects along with ensuring compliance with data protection regulations.

The successful candidate will manage a team, lead development initiatives, and ensure seamless operations of a significant fundraising platform.

Experience with Vanilla PHP, ElasticSearch, and database management is essential, along with a commitment to charity and compliance.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in leading development projects from scratch.
• Strong managerial background and ability to oversee operations.
• Experience with data protection regulations and compliance.

Responsibilities

• Developed and managed the Wonderful fundraising platform.
• Oversaw day-to-day operations and policy reviews.
• Acted as Data Protection Officer monitoring compliance with GDPR.

Skills

Vanilla PHP

ElasticSearch

MariaDB

Redis

Data Protection Compliance

Tools

Payment Vetting Tools

Kickbox.io

Twilio

Job description

Operations Director & Lead Developer — Wonderful Organisation

Summary & background

Wonderful is a not-for-profit organisation that ran the Wonderful fundraising platform, with 100% of all donations going to the charities of the fundraiser's choice. The bottom line and fees for the platform are paid by corporate sponsorship and like-minded philanthropists.

My place in the company

Working with the chairman on this project, I was the sole lead developer on the fundraising platform, building from scratch on bare-tin in a managed datacentre. Over a period of 6 months, I developed the Wonderful fundraising platform using Vanilla PHP, ElasticSearch, MariaDB and Redis, whilst integrating with a number of third-party services for verification, fulfilment and communications, including Kickbox.io for email validation and Twilio for SMS telephone validation.

Upon the successful launch of the platform I was promoted to Operations Director to oversee the day-to-day operations and running of the platform. Wonderful's policy is that 100% of the donations made by users go to the charity, no deductions at all, allowing the £2.3M of donations made to date to arrive at the charity unimpeded.

As the platform gained traction, and with corporate sponsors coming on board, I took a more managerial role — reviewing policy and procedure for enquiries, complaints, charity communications and other related tasks. Using our upstream payment provider tools, my day-to-day tasks also involved payment vetting of over £10,000 of donations per day, fraud review and dispute resolution, working closely with fundraisers, charities and issuing banks.

Given the continuing and ever-growing donation turnover, and the introduction of GDPR, a decision was made to also have me as the responsible Data Protection Officer, monitoring compliance of all donations' data transferral, charity data acquisition and associated marketing communications from the platform.

As an FCA Small Payments Institute, we also had a reporting responsibility.

This role was a secondment from my position at Nexbridge .