Development Team Leader (Data Services)

Join the Access Family and see how we make software ideas become a reality!

Our core value of ‘Love work, Love life’ has been central to our success and so we’re looking for people to join us who share our passion for making things better every day, to help us achieve 2 million users of the Access Workspace platform.

Are you ready for the challenge?

 What are we all about?

At Access we love software and how technology never stays the same. It's this obsession that drives us to work closely across sectors to understand the business needs of our customers - from professional services to manufacturing to not for profits and more.

We're passionate about helping our customers stay one step ahead of the challenges facing their industry and business. That's why over 1 million users and over 35,000 organisations rely on Access software to help their organisation thrive.

This position is for a Development Team Leader, with a proven track record in Data Services, to take the helm of a growing team. Reporting to the Development Manager, you will be influential in the development process and you will be accountable for producing iterative high-quality deliverables, to align with the business strategy in the Health & Social Care sector. You will have accountability for ensuring our software meets business requirements, aligns with technology and governance standards and ensure delivery of on-time, quality solutions.

About you:

You are a dynamic, skilled individual with a passion for technology and a keen sense of pride in the work you do. You are a strong team player who thrives on close collaboration with your colleagues and takes shared ownership of the development pipeline along with the team. You are focused on delivering high-quality solutions to given times lines and are comfortable in an agile environment. You are constantly seeking to improve both your skills and the skills of others and enjoy working in a fast-paced dynamic company. You will lead the Data Services team, working closely with the assigned Product Manager and Business Analyst. You will contribute to planning sessions and architect technical solutions as well as guide the technical evolution of products.

Day-to-day, you will:

• Ensure the team designs and develops software solutions to meet agreed acceptance criteria and stories using a range of languages and technologies. Ensure development standards are established, known and followed within an agile team.
• Participate in requirements analysis: highlight omissions and gaps; pro-actively contribute to discussions; understand the scope, risk and complexity of changes by challenging and providing feedback to the stories and acceptance criteria.
• Lead an Agile squad, driving technical excellence throughout the development process, and taking accountability for the deliverables of the development squad.
• Responsible for the team’s conformance to quality gates, and any rectification plans if these are not met.
• Understand and actively push test automation design principles, best practices, coverage and strategy applicable to the product(s).
• Communicate with and guide stakeholders in various departments at various levels, making recommendations based on risk, commercial factors, technical approach and strategic objectives.
• Ownership of facilitating the Team Path to Great maturity model, including regular team assessments against the model, supporting the agreed team improvements, as well as capturing and storing the outputs.
• Ownership of the squad's Time Recording requirements and conformance, enabling Access to accurately and easily file Capex, R&D and Opex tax reclaim.
• HR responsibilities for the squad, including performance management, personal development (ESP and Path to Great) and any absence requests and management.

As a well-rounded Development Team Leader, your Skills and Experiences likely include:

• Motivate and lead the team, driving career development and high performance, and support the team to upskill and achieve their potential.
• Collaborative and pragmatic. Able to communicate with, advise and guide all stakeholders in various departments at various levels, making recommendations based on risk, commercial factors, technical approach and strategic objectives. Demonstrate self-awareness and ability to adapt the message according to the audience to achieve positive results.
• Manage squad to produce efficient CI pipelines for highly available distributed systems using appropriate technology, tooling and scripting that includes the compilation, optimisation, testing and configuration of the various deployed resources.
• Ensures the team can produce high quality, clean, self-documenting code that is well structured, well-named, simple and easy to read. Stay up to date with the latest technology, patterns and practices.
• Proactively manage the Roadmap with the team, demonstrating a good understanding of technical, commercial and risk factors, and recommending priorities.
• Able to make risk-based decisions, using information such as the likelihood of failure, customer usage, workarounds to manage risks within deliverables.
• Ability to manage/mitigate release and program risks in addition to isolated risks, through environment recommendations, codebase recommendations, process and approaches; as well as prioritisation of testing
• Actively promote and show ownership of Quality centred activities including code reviews, collaboration with QA, good planning, early discovery of defects, functional testing by the developer before handover to QA, optimal running of regression periods and proactive risk management.
• Able to design and disseminate key metrics to communicate progress, risks, quality stats and development areas for iterations and releases.
• Provide excellent guidance and advice on soft-skill, development approaches and test-centric matters.
• Proactively discuss performance against role responsibilities, competencies and objectives and proactively set any required remedial courses of action - which is then monitored and managed with the individual.
• Drive Career Development within the team, helping them upskill to achieve their potential. Drive and implement change within the squad to achieve squad and business objectives.
• Able to identify where discrepancies between best practices are either commercial/business decisions or areas for improvement across the Product Development disciplines.

What does Access offer you?

We are a growing software company and we deliver on what we say we do! We take the development of our people very seriously! We will work with you to carve out your success plan and an opportunity to accelerate your career and make a real difference.

In addition to our standard benefits of 25 days holiday, a match contributory pension and healthcare you will get:  

• A Competitive Salary
• Giving Back/Charity days
• Quarterly Socials
• 6 weeks Sabbaticals (after 6 years of service)
• The Access Group Big Break: our all-expenses paid holiday to Spain

Become part of our amazing Access family!

At Access we're all about helping everyone Love Work and Love Life because we believe people can only be at their best when they can be themselves, love what they do and do what they love.

We love the fact that we’re all different. Having more diverse perspectives at work improves how we run our business, helps us support our customers, and when you think about it, it's just more fun. So, no matter what makes you individual, as long as you’re qualified, we can’t wait for your application.