The Vacancy

As a business, Hermes is driven by our four values of; Do the right thing, Dare to be different, Strive for more and Be customer obsessed.  It’s because of these values that we are the UK’s leading consumer delivery service handling over 630 million parcels per year and still growing and our IT team help to drive that growth.

Hermes has undergone a significant transformation moving from a parcel-centric business to a customer-focused business.  There continues to be significant investment into IT realising Hermes’ vision of being a digital business with data being a significant enabler for the Hermes Business Strategy.

As a result of our continued growth, the Hermes Assurance & Engineering team have a brand new role for a Squad Lead (Prime Developer).

Overview:

The Prime back end Developer is responsible for designing and implementing high-quality software in line with established policies and technology stack.  The role also involves leading back end developers within several multi-disciplinary squads and working with Solution Business Analysts and Scrum Delivery Managers and Application Design Developers in the delivery of business goals. 

This role will carry out all the following activities:

• Work with other engineering leads to improve structure and ways of working to ensure software quality and stability is at the forefront of their Squads priorities
• You will have the technical gravitas and experience in delivering software through modern engineering principals that will allow you to lead other back end, developers, improver their ways of working and adoption of best practice
• You will mentor and guide senior members of the team
• You will lead technical planning sessions and be able to show junior members of the team how the implementation of an Agile user story should be planned
• You will demonstrate excellence in defect prevention and be able to demonstrate how this model is applied to both senior and junior developers
• Maintaining documentation, ensuring that the knowledge acquired is available across the organisation and built into the squads as a discipline
• Supporting the Application Design Developers in performing detailed C3/C4 level design work during elaboration and software construction
• Develop performant, efficient and reliable applications
• Assists in the evaluation of options and trade-offs for implementing requirements.
• Design, code, verify, tests, document, amend and refactor complex software.
• Drive estimation and planning work with an adaptive (iterative/agile) approach.
• Collaborate in reviews of work with others as appropriate to validate the quality
• Staying up to date with the latest tech innovations and evaluate their value
• Work with 3rd Party Supplied Developers and testers to ensure adherence to Hermes Engineering standards and best practice
• Perform Line Management and Performance duties for the junior members of the squad.

You will be accountable for:

• For driving improvements in Engineering Quality KPI’s
• Ensuring your squad develop fast, scalable, reliable, and efficient apps
• Making sure engineering policies, standards and best practice are adhered to across your given squads
• Through your experience of modern software development principals and tooling make improvements to the documented standards and drive their adoption
• Through your experience of implementing software into cloud-hosted platforms ensure infrastructure config is appropriately managed as code
• Ensure the principals of CI/CD are adhered to within your squad – advise on improvements and using those principals to increase the deployment frequency of your squad
• Contributing to the C3/C4 level designs for projects in elaboration in relation to the apps/services your squad will own
• Ensuring all user stories within your squads' remit are appropriately planned in the detail
• Ensuring your Squads adopts a defect prevention testing strategy, using your experience of unit, mutation, integration and pact test to adopt best practice
• Ensuring your squads code repositories are appropriately managed.
• Ensuring your squads of backend/front end developers and testers deliver using the documented standards and best practice
• Ensure your squad works in a collaborative way, driving code reviews to validate quality. Using your experience to make the best use of TDD, BDD and Pair Programming
• Line Management and Performance Reviews for your squad.
• Ensuring any 3rd Party supplied resources within your given squad also adhere to Hermes Engineering Standards and Best Practice, using your technical gravitas to drive adoption of all the above accountabilities with the 3rd part developers and testers  

Knowledge & Experience:

• 5+ years’ experience building commercial applications in Java
• Experience with Java and Spring boot is a must
• Experience of using Object Orientated design patterns in building software solutions
• Board Experience of AWS Frameworks and containers – EC2,ECS, Fargate etc and be able to advise on the best use
• Experience working with an agile framework (Scrum/Kanban)
• Experience using DevOps principles and CI/CD automation practices
• RDBMS experience
• Significant Commercial Experience of developing distributed systems using a messaging-based architecture (ideally RabbitMQ or SQS)

Technical & People Skills:

• Java 11+
• Spring Boot
• REST API (JSON) & WebSockets
• Agile, Scrum, BDD, TDD, Pull Request, CI/CD
• Good working knowledge of unit testing & integration testing frameworks
• Excellent communication skills (oral/written)
• Collaborative and keen to share knowledge with others