JOB TITLE:                      Senior Engineer

LOCATION:                     Manchester

REPORTING TO:              Product Team Leader

DIRECT REPORTS:          None

JOB PURPOSE:

Reporting to the Product Team Leader, the Senior Engineer will be responsible for the development and maintenance of the product ensuring that designs follow good Object Oriented principles and any code changes fit with the future direction of the core product. In addition they will be focused on process execution in line with company goals.

OBJECTIVES

• Ensure that all designs are technically sound and follow good Object Oriented principles.
• Ensure that the company prescribed processes and standards are adhered to and contribute to their improvement with a view to increasing team efficiency.
• Provide technical leadership to the team and provide mentoring and coaching to junior team members in quality software development, testing and deployment.

MAIN DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Deputising for the Team Leader when required
• Responsible for the analysis, design, development, test and documentation of software solutions making specific determinations about system performance, future use and maintenance.
• Responsible for the planning, monitoring and supervision of tasks, projects and resources delegated by the Team Leader.
• Responsible for the controlling of configuration management on large projects.
• Responsible for the review of software changes made by junior team members.
• Provide recommendations to the Team Leader concerning issues of programmer productivity and efficiency including identifying tasks which require automation.
• Providing & reviewing work estimates (ensuring estimate accuracy) and tracking changes against these estimates.
• Assist the Team Leader in ensuring that progress against all tasks is monitored and reported as defined with the Company Software Development and Project Management processes.
• Analysis of the impact of slips on the programme and propose recovery or containment actions to the Team Leader.
• Responsible for ensuring all development risks & assumptions are identified, reported & monitored to manage their impact on schedule for assigned tasks.
• Ensure all team issues are identified & reported, resolved if possible or escalated to the Team Leader for resolution.
• Contribution to and review of Project Management & Software Development Plans
• Responsible for increasing software quality, including reviewing project deliverables.
• Assist the Team Leader in the delivery of builds and ensuring the successful and timely entry to major project milestones by the scheduled dates and ensuring appropriate reviews (including product/database integrity) & unit/integration testing are carried out.

SKILLS /EXPERIENCE

Essential:

• A solid understanding of networking/distributed computing environment concepts in a real time environment.
• Hands-on experience of software development throughout the whole development lifecycle including design, development, testing, deployment and support.
• The ability to make decisions on software solutions to improve performance and maintainability.
• Experience of leading small projects/developments including developing and maintaining plans using Microsoft Project.
• Experience of formal design techniques including Object Oriented Analysis and Design, Tiered Architectures and Design Patterns.
• Experience and ability to teach or instruct co-workers.
• Methodologies/Tools/Platforms:
• UNIX (Solaris/AIX/HP, Shell Scripts)
• Java
• Oracle 10g
• Windows
• Source Control tools (Subversion, PVCS, etc)
• Unit Testing (jUnit, etc)

Desirable:

• Experience of people management including day-to-day management of a team of engineers, creating development plans and setting objectives.
• Experience of High Availability solutions.
• Experience of writing papers and proposals.
• Experience of build automation including continuous integration.