Technical Lead / Architect
The perfect role for a strategic individual with confidence in creating technical specifications and solution designs!
About us
SMG is an award-winning network of specialist commerce agencies - Threefold, Capture and our tech led agency, Plan-Apps. At SMG, our people are at the heart of everything we do and we are proud to provide opportunities for career growth, recognising and rewarding great work, and doing this within an inclusive, highly flexible, and innovative environment.
We are dedicated to support our employees to be the best version of themselves both inside and outside of work. We have an extraordinary culture built by exceptional people and it’s because of this that we’ve been recognised by Best Companies within the top 5 best Marketing & Media agencies to work for, with a World Class and Outstanding accreditation across the past 2 years.
Across the group, we have a shared mission to lead connected commerce marketing.
Read a summary of what each of our agencies do here!
The role
As a Technical Lead / Architect, your role will be to help bridge the gap between our Product team and the technical aspects of the project, ensuring the development team is aligned with the project’s goals, timelines, and quality standards. You will be responsible for creating technical specifications and solution designs and leading the team through the delivery of them. You will play a crucial role in guiding the team through any technical challenges, making strategic decisions that ensure we deliver robust, maintainable, and secure features into our platform. As a mentor and career manager, you will also foster a collaborative and productive working environment that encourages innovation and continuous improvement within the team.
What you'll be doing
We pride ourselves on creating challenging and exciting opportunities, meaning that no two days are the same. However, here's an idea of what your responsibilities will look like:
- Working closely with the Product team to help refine requirements ready for specification.
- Create technical design specifications in a variety of formats. Depending on the problem & solution these could be architecture diagrams, technical design specs, API specifications, data matrices/spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations - or any combination that articulates the solution ready for development.
- Play an active role in the platform re-architecture, helping to plan how we will scale the platform to meet future growth, new business models, and internationalisations.
- Ensuring the team fully understands proposed solutions, and ensuring tickets are detailed and clear for the development team to work on.
- Oversee our development squads and when needed help unblock technical challenges by contributing code.
- Ensure our codebase follows best practice and establish high quality code patterns.
- Lead by example by actively reviewing and writing high quality code for the platform as required and work closely with Product and Delivery teams to continuously ensure we are working efficiently and delivering at pace.
- Conduct technical code reviews and ensure we are delivering robust, maintainable, and secure code at all times.
- Work closely with the Technical Director to ensure we are using the right tools and technologies to deliver.
- Career management responsibility for junior team members, conducting reviews, setting objectives, and being their role model and mentor.
- Assist in attracting, interviewing, and hiring of new talent in the team.
What you'll need to have / be
- A strong understanding of our tech stack, and the ability to help troubleshoot coding issues within it.
- Deep knowledge of the TypeScript and/or JavaScript languages and related frameworks, must include React, node.js (or both) and practical and real-world experience working with no-sql databases, particularly MongoDB.
- Experienced at creating a wide range of different technical design documentation for projects big and small.
- Experienced at working on cloud native solutions, ideally utilising AWS.
- Comfortable working with complex data sets and workflows.
- Experience working in a multi-team environment with shared production environments.
- Practical experience of leading teams in an agile environment.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
- Good understanding of security and performance considerations.
P.s. we try really hard to make sure that we list only essential criteria here, BUT if you think you can do an amazing job, yet don't have every single thing on this list, we'd still love to hear from you.
The best bits
Here at SMG we are dedicated to continuously reviewing and improving our benefits package to offer the best that we can for our people. We have a whole page dedicated to our benefits here, but here's some of our favourites...
💰 Generous discretionary bonus scheme
🧘♂️ £1,800 yearly wellbeing fund (on top of your salary!) towards your personal wellbeing and passions
🫶 4 additional Wellbeing Days - one to be taken each quarter, dedicated to focusing on your wellbeing
📚 £500 yearly “Uni Fund” towards learning and development
🎧 Free headspace subscription
🕐 4pm Friday finishes all year round
🥳 Two fully paid conferences a year at Summer & Winter, as well as a dedicated team that put on activities and celebrations throughout the year
The process
- We will invite you to a first interview which we try to keep relatively informal, so it gives you the opportunity to share your authentic self. The hiring team will be looking to understand more about your experience and why you're interested in working with us.
- There will be a second interview which will last a little longer, and involve some form of task to showcase your ability to do the role.
- We then invite you to a meet & greet which is an opportunity for you to meet the team you'll be joining and ask them questions about the role and wider business.
🌟 Helping you shine 🌟
We are committed to helping you shine and show your full potential by making any changes you might need throughout your application. If you need an alternative way of applying for this role, support with understanding the role and its requirements, changes to be made to the way we hold our interviews, or anything else, then please reach out to us. You can either let us know on your application form or contact the people team to discuss how we can help on careers@smg.team.
🤝 SMG are proud to be an equal opportunities employer 🤝
We are fully committed to providing equality in the workplace and ensure all opportunities for, and during employment, will be afforded to individuals fairly and irrespective of age, disability, gender, gender reassignment, marital or civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity, race including colour, ethnic or national origins and nationality, religion or belief or sexual orientation ("the protected characteristics"). We want our organisation to reflect the diversity of our communities and we welcome applications from people from all backgrounds. More information on what we are doing can be found here.
Our full data retention policy can be found here. Got questions? Take a look at our FAQ's here.
- Department
- Development
- Locations
- London
- Remote status
- Hybrid Remote
London
Life at SMG
Our workplace culture is super important to us and we have a team dedicated to making SMG a great place to work. Whether it's Wellbeing Wednesday, a virtual quiz, or giving back to our charity partner The Trussell Trust, there is always something going on here at SMG. Take a look at some of the things we've been up to on our Life at SMG page.
Technical Lead / Architect
The perfect role for a strategic individual with confidence in creating technical specifications and solution designs!
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