Technical Lead

Dunelm; Leicester, Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 75,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Dunelm in the United Kingdom is seeking a Technical Lead to shape strategy and standards across the Engineering team. This hybrid role involves regular hands-on design in a cross-functional crew, with one day per week in Leicester or London.

You'll coach engineers, promote DevOps, drive CI/CD, and steer technology choices such as Node.js, React, TypeScript and AWS services to deliver scalable, secure software.

Qualifications

• Designing scalable, secure, high-performing architectures.
• Leading agile software development teams.
• Experience with AWS Serverless services (Lambda, API Gateway, etc.).
• Strong mentoring and coaching skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead, motivate, and inspire a cross-functional team.
• Collaborate with Principal Engineers on engineering chapter.
• Hands-on design and development with pair programming.
• Drive agile practices, sprint planning, and estimation.
• Ensure code quality, test coverage, and maintainability.
• Promote DevOps culture and CI/CD pipelines.
• Influence technical direction and stack choices.
• Continuously improve engineering practices and speed.

Skills

Architecting scalable systems

AWS Serverless

Team leadership

Mentoring/Coaching

Problem solving

Communication

Node.js

React

Typescript

AWS Lambda

GraphQL

Jest

Microservices

RESTful APIs

CI/CD

Linux/OSX

Automated testing

Tools

AWS Lambda

Jest

Job description

Overview

Work your way, together

We’re a hybrid business, which means you’ll have flexibility alongside time together with your team. In this role, you can expect 1 day a week in our Leicester or London office, helping you stay connected, collaborate and do your best work for our customers.

Our Engineering Department plays a crucial role in driving our company's growth, and we are committed to providing our team with the latest tools, technologies, and techniques to help them excel and take us to new heights. With our continuous growth, we are seeking talented and ambitious individuals to join our dynamic team and contribute their unique ideas and perspectives. We are an ever-expanding team where every voice counts!

This is a technical leadership practitioner role. The incumbent will define technical strategy and set technical standards across the domain. The ideal candidate should have both depth and breadth in technical skills, with a focus on a core skill and the ability to support the team in delivering greater value and increased flow through other skills.

The Technical Lead will be up-to-date with the latest tech trends, continuously learning and experimenting with innovative technologies to drive the team's success. A Lean and Agile expert, this role will coach and mentor colleagues, fostering a culture of experimentation, learning, and continuous improvement.

To excel in the role, the candidate should be adept at adopting new ways of working and best practices from outside the organization, driving their implementation within the crew and across Dunelm Engineering.

What you'll be doing

• Lead, motivate, and inspire a team to generate value for Dunelm.
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement within the team.
• Work closely with the Principal Engineers to contribute to the overall Engineering Chapter.
• Actively participate in hands-on design and development within a self-organizing, cross-functional team utilizing best practices and Pair Programming techniques.
• Embrace an agile approach, fail quickly, and iterate rapidly to keep pace with the dynamic and exciting retail sector.
• Share responsibility for sprint planning, backlog refinement, and task estimation.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to identify business requirements and develop solutions that meet those needs.
• Create clean, efficient, and scalable code using industry best practices and design patterns.
• Participate in code reviews and provide constructive feedback to all contributors to improve code quality and maintainability.
• Take responsibility for ensuring that code is implemented to a high quality standard, including supportability, maintainability, scalability, and security.
• Promote and embody the DevOps culture, driving best practices in our CI/CD pipelines.
• Influence the technical direction of the team and the wider business, including technology stack and design decisions.
• Facilitate effective problem-solving and drive solutions to completion.
• Keep up to date with industry trends and technologies to ensure that the software we build remains current and competitive.

What we'll look for in you

Essential skills:

• Demonstrated expertise in designing scalable, secure, and high-performing architecture.
• Proven track record in designing and implementing AWS Serverless services.
• Experience leading agile software development teams.
• Strong mentoring and coaching skills to help develop team members' capabilities.
• Exceptional problem-solving skills to address complex challenges.
• Effective communication skills to collaborate with cross-functional teams and stakeholders.
• Proficient in some or all of our key technologies, such as Node.js, React, Typescript, AWS Lambda, JavaScript, GraphQL, and Jest.
• Skilled in functional development methodologies.
• Proficient in microservices and RESTful architectures.
• Experienced in development within Linux or OSX environments.
• Knowledgeable in CI/CD practices and processes to promote efficient delivery of high-quality products.
• Proficient in writing comprehensive automated functional tests to ensure code quality.
• A passion for technology and a desire to explore the latest innovative tech while continuously learning and growing.
• Comfortable working in agile environments, embracing a culture of failing fast and pivoting as necessary to deliver successful outcomes.

Desirable skills:

• Experience of working within a multichannel retailer and/or manufacturer.
• Experience of integrating headless SaaS packages with in-house built software
• Experience handling sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) data.
• Unit Testing frameworks both server-side and client-side
• Content Delivery Networks (Caching and optimisation)
• Profiling and optimizing applications across all tiers of development.
• Isomorphic Architecture
• Event Driven Architecture
• Device agnostic principles (responsive design)
• OO and Functional design best practices
• Design patterns

Behaviours

Customer First: You should prioritize the customer experience and continuously seek ways to improve it.

Team working: You should be a team player and effectively collaborate with colleagues to achieve common goals.

Innovating: You should have a curious and explorative mindset, continuously seeking out new technologies and methodologies that can drive business growth and enhance products, services, and processes.

Make It Happen: You should take accountability for your work and actively identify technical challenges, developing and implementing solutions in a timely and high-quality manner.