Technical Principal Consultant

Equal Experts is an innovative consultancy specialising in the delivery of custom software solutions for blue-chip enterprise and public sector clients across a range of industry sectors. We work on important projects for our clients, deliver market-leading propositions across the digital, online and mobile

channels, and are recognised for our leadership in the application of agile and lean delivery methods to assure delivery. We have offices in Australia, India, South Africa, the UK, the EU and the USA.

About the job

The role of the Tech Principal is not a textbook checklist, however, there are technical responsibilities that a team must fulfil and we expect the Tech Principal to ensure these responsibilities are covered and be able to cover them themselves if needed. We expect Tech Principals to take a collaborative approach to leading their team. This is especially important when considering the amount of experience that each of our consultants brings.

Given this, we expect you to

• Respect the other members of your team and recognize you don’t always know best.
• Spot gaps in team capability and figure out how to fix them as a team.
• Be hands-on, able, and willing to contribute to development, however, don’t expect to be coding all of the time.
• Encourage the team to be proactive, and give them responsibility.

Responsibilities

• Have a clear understanding of the deployment architecture.
• Have a clear understanding of the build pipeline.
• Understand how you get changes into production.
• Understand how all parts of the system work together.
• Facilitate technical communication with other teams, both within your engagement and across other EE clients.
• Actively seek to remove knowledge silos within the team.
• Ensure you have a release/branching strategy in place.
• Act as the primary point of contact for your team when communicating with other teams..
• Ensure there is a technical vision for the team.
• Liaise with environment specialists to ensure smooth deployments to production.
• Encourage the team to follow good development practices aligned with EE technical values.
• Feedback to the delivery lead or engagement manager on the quality of your team (good and bad).
• Recognize team members that have the potential to grow into team leads.
• Ensure the use of new technologies or dependencies does not block the team.
• Ensure the team keeps necessary architectural documents up to date.
• Keep an eye on the long-term consequences of architectural choices, and remind others when necessary.
• Build good relationships with your team members. Act as a mentor when required.
• Keep the client informed and engaged in the technical side of the project.
• Build relationships across your client community.

Technologies / Experience

The successful candidate must have the following experience:

• Worked as the tech lead of a development/delivery team in a large organization.
• Be deeply proficient in at least one programming language.
• Be comfortable using other languages and evidence using multiple languages.
• Have hands-on experience with some form of configuration management tooling, e.g. Ansible, Chef, Puppet.
• Have hands-on experience with at least one continuous integration and continuous delivery technology, e.g. Jenkins, Go, Team City, or Bamboo.
• Full stack development experience from the user interface through to data persistence.
• A strong proponent of XP practices such as TDD.
• Working with a delivery team to formulate an automated test strategy.
• Worked as part of a number of agile delivery teams and saw a number of different approaches to delivery.
• Good appreciation of secure coding practices and end-to-end system security.

The following exposure will also be looked on favorably

• Performing an ‘architect’ role, while retaining hands-on involvement.
• Working with cloud hosting platforms such as AWS, Rackspace, Azure, etc.
• Infrastructure management technologies such as Cloud Formation or Terraform.