Software Engineering Lead

At City Electrical Factors, we encourage our people to ask questions, create, discover, and learn.

If you're passionate about what you do and think you can contribute, we encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every requirement listed. Your unique experiences and perspectives could be exactly what we need to grow and innovate.

Let's build something great together!

About CEF:

CEF is a global electrical wholesaler, providing electrical products to people in the industry known for its extensive range of products and commitment to customer service. Founded in 1951 in the United Kingdom, it has since expanded to over 1,000 locations across multiple countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe.

We in IT are delivering value to our business and our customers with the innovative solutions that enable our business to better serve our customers today and in the future. We recognise that technology and data are at the forefront of this.

Our Global IT team deliver a portfolio of transformative work, expand our digital options, upgrade and future-proof our systems to place us at the forefront of the marketplace.

To do this, we need talented and creative people across all areas to join us in delivering our evolution to enable our forward-thinking business over the next few years and beyond, and this is where you come in...

Life as a Software Engineering Lead at CEF:

As a Software Engineering Lead at CityIT you will be providing leadership to a small team of Software Engineers through a mixture of hands-on coding, coaching and mentoring. You’ll create opportunities for your team to reach their full potential by encouraging both individual and team development along with introducing and nurturing innovation.

Being responsible for helping fulfil our vision of moving legacy systems to flexible microservices and serverless architecture by applying both your technical experience and people skills to scale a high performing engineering function.

You’ll be experienced in TypeScript development with extensive hands-on experience in using AWS SDK and AWS CDK to architect and build robust scalable, serverless-first shared code and platforms.

Your Objectives:

• Responsible for leading a small software engineering team (up to 4/5 engineers) in building enterprise level solutions (estimated 60% hands-on coding) and influencing code quality and stability
• Lead and ensure your team are working as a cohesive unit aligned to the principles and philosophy of the City Electric IT strategy and Ways of Working
• Champion and drive forward the creation of a culture in which employees take responsibility, help each other to be successful and remain a step ahead
• Manage the performance review process for your team through 1-2-1s, objective setting, mentoring and coaching
• Work with the delivery lead(s) around capacity planning, technical delivery requirements and quality standards
• Collaborate with the other Software Engineer Leads and the QA team to collectively agree the scope and impact of all new initiatives within the department.
• Work with the Software Engineering Managers to create and establish an AWS and Serverless Academy to ensure there is a consistent and best practice process for staff cross training
• Collaborate with the other Software Engineering Leads to collectively agree on standardised engineering tools and standards, i.e. coding standards, code reviews and pull requests amongst others
• Ensure that all your team members have a clear understanding of the overall system architecture and design components
• Work with the Software Engineering Manager around recruitment in terms of your team needs and helping with the holistic process from start to finish, including the onboarding and probation process

Key Skills and Experience:

• Proficient in TypeScript development
• Expertise in AWS services within a serverless-first, microservices-oriented architecture, including but not limited to:
• Compute: Lambda, ECS, Fargate, EC2
• Storage: S3, DynamoDB, RDS
• API Management: API Gateway, AppSync
• Orchestration: Step Functions, EventBridge
• Security: IAM, Cognito, Secrets Manager, KMS
• Networking: VPC, CloudFront, Route 53, Load Balancers
• Experience using Git/GitLab and proficiency in CI/CD pipelines
• Experience with front-end frameworks such as Vue, React or Next.js would be desirable

Interview Process:

• Screening Call with Talent Acquisition (30 mins)
• Technical Interview over Microsoft Teams with one of our Global Head of Domain and a member from our development team (60 mins)
• Culture and Values Interview over Microsoft Teams call with the wider Domain team(60 mins)

Package:

• Competitive basic salary
• Annual IT Bonus scheme
• Our teams predominantly work remotely but we have an award-winning IT Headquarters based in Durham where you’ll always receive a warm welcome!
• Pension: 5% employee / 3% employer (Total 8%)
• Champion Health – a comprehensive physical, mental & financial wellbeing platform, offering bespoke content on all aspects of wellbeing & life
• Free use of the state-of-the-art private gym at our IT Headquarters

Location

Our IT Team like to get together in the Durham office on occasion. This is optional and the role is predominantly home based however there may be some required travel to the Durham or Kenilworth office for team meetings and other events.