Lead, Product Development

The Lead, Product Development is the senior technical authority in the Company’s Product Development function and hands-on engineering leader of the team and that builds the Company’s digital products. The Lead owns the technical architecture, engineering standards, code quality and technical delivery of the product estate, and personally leads the hardest technical work.

Tis is a heavily technical, hands-on role. The Lead is expected to design systems, write and review production code, set and enforce engineering standards, and make architecture and technical-design decisions on which the products depend, while technically leading and mentoring the Senior Software Developers, Software Developer, UI/UX Designer and QA/QC Analyst. Where the Manager owns what is built and for whom, the Lead owns how it is built and to what technical standard.

Employment Type: 2-year contract
Location: Port-of-Spain

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:-

Technical architecture and design

• Own the technical architecture of the product estate, web and mobile applications, APIs, data models, integration and cloud deployment, and make the architecture and technical-design decisions within the Company’s approved technology direction.
• Lead technical discovery on new requirements: assess feasibility, technical risk and effort, and translate solution definitions into technical designs.
• Own the technology stack and technical standards, and manage technical debt with a register and dedicated capacity each cycle.

Hands-on engineering

• Personally design, build and review production code, taking the most complex and critical technical work.
• Set the standard for engineering craftsmanship across the team through direct contribution and example.
• Solve the hardest technical problems and unblock the team technically.

Engineering standards and quality

• Define and enforce coding standards, code-review practice, source control and branching strategy on the Company’s repository organisation, and the build and deployment pipelines.
• Maintain environment discipline across development, test, staging, and production, including access control and the prohibition of production data in lower environments.
• Own the release-engineering process, entry and exit criteria, deployment and rollback, and technical release approval.
• Ensure technical documentation, architecture, data models, interface contracts, runbooks is produces and kept current as a condition of release.

Secure compliant engineering

• Implement payment security scope reduction in the build – tokenisation and hosted-field or Microform patterns, so that cardholder data does not enter Company systems and equivalent minimisation for personal data.
• Engage Cyber / Technical Security at design stage, build security review, testing and remediation into the technical plan, and remediate findings to agreed service levels.
• Implement the general privacy principles of the Data Protection Act in the build.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE:-

• A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related discipline, a postgraduate qualification is an advantage.
• Eight (8) years’ hands-on software engineering, of which at least 2-3 years in a technical-lead or senior engineering roe leading and reviewing the work of others.
• Deep, current, hands-on expertise across modern web and mobile development, API design, databases and cloud development and still writing and reviewing production code.
• Demonstratable delivery of consumer-facing digital products at scale, from architecture through live operation and iteration.
• Experience in payments, financial services or another regulated environment is strongly preferred; hands-on experience of payment security scope reduction (tokenisation and hosted fields) is a significant advantage.
• The Lead must remain sufficiently current to conduct meaningful code review and to make the architecture and technical-design decisions.

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS AND COMPETENCIES:-

• Modern web and mobile application architecture; API design, database design, cloud deployment (for e.g. Microsoft Azure)
• Continuous integration and deployment, environment and release management.
• Secure development practice, including the OWASP Top Ten and payment security scope reduction, accessibility implementation to WCAG2.1 Level AA.
• Rest automation awareness and a disciplined approach to technical quality.