Technical Lead - Integrations (API)

Birmingham, England, United Kingdom

12/16/2024

General

Job Title: Technical Lead

Division: Information Technology

Key Relationships: Strategy and Innovation, Engineering, Data Management, Infrastructure, Operational & Managerial Staff, Platform Leads, Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Business Stakeholders

Job Summary

The Technical Lead (ESS) is the main conduit between development and architecture teams. They will ensure that all Beazley’s software policies and strategies are followed, and that the development team are aligned with the architecture and vision of software development.

The Technical Lead also has a strong set of skills around project design and understands that the best design in the world stands no chance of succeeding if there is no plan with options for how to build it: on time, on quality and on budget.

The Technical Lead (ESS) helps contribute to a set of re-usable infrastructure, tooling, and best practices that will allow developers to focus on adding business value rather than building plumbing code. The Technical Lead has a laser focus on quality and is an expert in security and the various levels of the testing pyramid. They will help drive consistency of approach across all stages of the software delivery cycle - including security, testing, and deployment (by helping to nurture a DevOps culture across the teams with which they are engaged). The Technical Lead ensures the health of the team and that standards are always maintained.

Utilising their knowledge of Beazley’s existing capabilities, as well as a broad knowledge of other relevant and emerging technology, the Technical Lead takes guidance from both the Technical Architecture and Enterprise Architecture teams to ensure that all proposed solutions align with the business, technology strategies, and security. The Technical Lead is part of the technical community and will collaborate and share knowledge accordingly.

The Technical Lead Is Responsible For

• Providing technical leadership, mentoring and support to software development teams.
• Helping to design project plans that deliver designs to production securely, on time, on quality, and on budget.
• Driving consistency of approach in all aspects of the Software Delivery Cycle - including security, testing, and deployment.
• Challenging complex technology and IT led solutions
• Overall health the applications they work on
  
  

Scope Of Activities

• Ensure all approaches comply with the requirements and governance frameworks
• Work closely with development squads to mentor and train developers and testers.
• Help minimize the cost of supporting and owning solutions over the long term.
• Contribute to and drive the creation of detailed documentation covering all facets of system design and support.
• Work with Change Delivery to ensure that the delivered system is consistent with the agreed architecture and delivers value to the stakeholders.
• Understand, advocate, and support the Beazley technology strategy
• Ensure solutions are aligned with the business and technology strategies
• Provide expert advice on industry and application trends
• Ensure that capabilities, where practical, are consolidated to increase the value of IT as a service.
  
  

General

At Beazley we are committed to doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do. It is important that within all your interactions both internally and externally you adhere to this principle through adoption of Beazley’s core values and behaviours - PIED and Being Beazley.

• Adopt the Beazley culture of Professionalism, Integrity, Effectiveness and Dynamic that contributes to an internal environment of teamwork and promote a positive brand image and experience to our external customers.
• Comply with Beazley procedures, policies and regulations including the code of conduct. Undertake training on Beazley policies and procedures as delivered by your line manager, the Talent Management development or assurance teams (compliance, risk, internal audit) either directly, via e-learning or the learning management system.
• Display business ethics that uphold the interests of all our customers.
• Ensure all interactions with customers are focused on delivering a fair outcome, including having the right products for their needs.
• Comply with any specific responsibilities necessary for your role as outlined by your line manager, the Talent Management or assurance teams (compliance, risk, internal audit) and ensure you keep up to date with developments in these areas. This may include, amongst others, Beazley’s underwriting control standards, Beazley’s claims control standards, other Beazley standards and customer relationship management.
• Carry out additional responsibilities as individually notified, either through your objectives or through the learning management system. These may include membership of any Beazley committees or working groups.
  
  

Personal Specification

Education and Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, systems analysis or a related field of study, or equivalent experience
  
  

Knowledge/Experience/Skills

The candidate will have experience in building large scale, eventually consistent, enterprise systems, utilising multiple interaction modes beyond just HTTP.

• Experience of building hardened / secure systems
• Expert in researching and spiking solutions
• Expert at creating microservices from scratch
• Expert in modern cross-platform .NET (6 and above)
• Experience of Event Sourcing / CQRS patterns
• Experience of Confluent Cloud and Streaming
• Working knowledge of building Twelve/Fifteen-Factor applications for infrastructure agnostic deployments, e.g. Azure, on-premises, and Kubernetes
• Hands-on experience of Azure in a security hardened environment
• Hands on experience of Azure API Manager and spectrum of API configuration and deployment processes. Including terraforming underlying services
• Understanding of Asynchronous systems / Eventual Consistency / Message Buses
• SOA / Micro-service approaches and cost vs count
• Familiarity with information management practices
• Exposure to multiple, diverse technologies and processing environments
• Knowledge of business re-engineering principles and processes
• Exceptional interpersonal skills, including teamwork, facilitation, and negotiation
• Excellent problem solving, analytical, and technical skills
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Beneficial knowledge of Infrastructure As Code (preferably Terraform)
• Strong test automation experience covering unit tests, integration tests, non-functional, contract testing etc. Looking specifically for API testing using spectmatic and Postman/Newman
• Ability to spike and develop out testing approaches for elements such as Snowflake
• Use of various Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery tools preferably GitHub Actions
• Microservice architectural approaches
• Python knowledge and experience. At least able to work with data team and research follow provided tutorials and guidance. (Lead Python engineering not required)
• Self-starter in working through functionality development
• Able to operate asynchronously using team’s chats for advice and guidance
• Able to navigate central standards and guidance.
• Able to argue exceptions to standard practice where conventional thinking is not applicable
  
  

Competencies

• Ability to balance the long-term and short-term implications of individual decisions,
• Ability to bring a team of engineers together on a united vision,
• Ability to evaluate and understand the risk and reward of a proposed solution,
• Ability to propose multiple solutions to business problems,
• Ability to rapidly comprehend the functions and capabilities of new trends and technologies,
• Ability to translate complex domain specific concepts into knowledge that can be understood and consumed across domains.
  
  

Characteristics

• Highly supportive of the business and of its ideals and strategies
• Neutral toward technology, vendor and product choices; more interested in results than in personal preferences,
• Ability to work with projects and change initiatives to deliver their goals without compromising the delivery of the wider IT strategy,
• Effective at driving short-term actions that are consistent with long-term goals,
• Is motivated by long-term results.