Software and Platform Technical Lead

We’re looking for a Software and Platform Technical Lead to join our Castle Fintech team, an exciting venture to assemble a new financial services platform.

What will you do as a Software and Platform Technical Lead at N Brown?

• Guiding the technical direction and execution within their agile delivery squad, ensuring high-quality engineering practices and robust software and platform solutions.
• Providing technical leadership, mentoring, and support to software engineers and platform engineers within the squad, fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Working closely with the Principal Engineer and other Technical Leads, contributing to the Software Engineering Centre of Excellence by implementing best practices, reusable patterns, and consistent engineering standards across squads.
• Play a key role in technical decision-making, balancing delivery speed with long-term maintainability, scalability, and resilience.
• Participates in architectural discussions, code reviews, and hands-on development, ensuring that solutions align with business objectives, security requirements, and industry standards.
• Track and manage technical debt within their squad, collaborating with other leads to ensure it is addressed proactively and sustainably across the platform.
• By acting as a bridge between engineering and product teams, they help define technical roadmaps, de-risk complex implementations, and drive continuous improvement within their squad.
• Identifying and assessing new and emerging technologies, products, services, methods and techniques.

Line Management Skills

• Performance management- Improving organisational performance by developing the performance of individuals and workgroups to meet agreed objectives with measurable results.
• Employee experience - Enhancing employee engagement and ways of working, empowering employees and supporting their health and wellbeing.
• Professional development- Facilitating the professional development of individuals in line with their career goals and organisational requirements.

What skills and experience will you have?

• Taking technical responsibility across all stages and iterations of software and platform development.
• Planning and driving software construction activities, adopting and adapting appropriate software development methods, tools and techniques.
• Contributing to the development of organisational policies, standards, and guidelines for software development.
• Deploying automation to achieve well-engineered and secure outcomes.
• Designing large or complex software applications, components and modules.
• Maintaining application support processes, and checks that all requests for support are dealt with according to agreed procedures.
• Maintains and administers tools and methods for software delivery, deployment and configuration. Maintains release processes and procedures.
• Coaching colleagues in developing target skills and capabilities in line with team and personal goals.
• Facilitating effective working relationships between team members
• Assisting in the development of new or improved practices and organisational processes or standards.
• Assisting projects, functions or teams in planning the quality management for their area of responsibility.

Technical Skills

• Agile development methodologies

• Application lifecycle management: Jira, Confluence

• Source control: Git, GitLab

• Consumption of RESTful services, incl. JSON.

• Continuous integration - build (GitLab CI), test, audit

• Code quality pipeline - unit testing, mocking

• Javascript/Typescript

• Javascript frameworks/tools: Node

• Microservices development through Containers or AWS Lambdas

• Development IDE (e.g., Visual Studio Code, WebStorm)

• Unit testing framework, e.g., Jest

• API Testing

• IaC, specifically Terraform

• AWS eg EC2/ECS/Fargate

• Managed cloud databases eg Amazon RDS

• Monitoring and alerting tooling eg Grafana/Kibana/Mpulse/Rigor

• Containerisation eg Docker

What’s in it for you?

• Hybrid working
• 24 days holiday (+ 8 bank holidays)
• Annual bonus scheme
• Enhanced maternity and adoption leave
• Company pension with up to 8% N Brown contribution
• Mental Health support both internally and externally, including access to our wellbeing champions and counselling services
• A range of financial wellbeing support
• Colleague discount across all N Brown brands
• Onsite café with subsidised rates and local restaurant discounts!
• Life Assurance and Private Medical Insurance
• Paid volunteer time – all our colleagues can take a full day paid to volunteer for a charity of their choice

N Brown – who we are and why work for us?

At N Brown, we’re committed to building a diverse workforce and creating an inclusive environment that values equality for all. Our vision is that by ‘championing inclusion, we’ll become the most loved and trusted fashion retailer’. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging are, therefore, at the heart of our culture.

We’re a forward-thinking digital retailer with a financial services proposition to be proud of. We’re customer-obsessed, serving them through three core brands: JD Williams, Simply Be, and Jacamo. We’re experienced, with over 160 years of trading under our belt. We’re inclusive, as we believe in fashion without boundaries; and we’re sustainable, striving to make as little impact on the planet as possible.

In May 2024 we were delighted to be named one of The Sunday Times Best Places to Work 2024. We work hard to create a happy and inclusive culture for everyone and we’re so proud to have made this list - as voted for by our very own colleagues!

Ways of Working

We offer hybrid working which varies across the business depending on the role you’re in. Our Head Office is located in the Northern Quarter in Manchester City Centre. So if you are travelling by train, tram or bus we’re perfectly located, plus we’re surrounded by cool cafes, trendy bars and the best places to eat!

Our working hours are 36.17 per week and our core working hours are between 10am - 4pm. Given we don’t have strict working hours you can find the working pattern that’s right for you.

Our promise to you:

We’re an equal opportunity employer and value diversity. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

What happens when you apply to a role at N Brown?

As soon as we receive your application, we’ll send you an email to let you know. We always aim to come back to you as soon as possible with an update and we really appreciate you taking the time to apply for a role with us. Good luck!