Development Manager

Overview

Role: Software Development Team Leader

Location: Harwell, Didcot Oxfordshire

Role ID: 2022-1589

Our vision is to create a safe and sustainable world

Ricardo plc is a global strategic, environmental, and engineering consulting company, listed on the London Stock Exchange. With over 100 years of engineering excellence and employing close to 3,000 employees in more than 20 countries, we provide exceptional levels of expertise in delivering leading-edge and innovative cross-sector sustainable products and solutions. Every day, we enable our customers to solve the most complex and dynamic challenges to help achieve a safe and sustainable world.

Energy & Environment, one of Ricardo plc’s five operating business units, is a leader in sustainability consultancy, solving complex environmental challenges through industry-leading analysis, advice and data. With more than 40 years of heritage in addressing air quality, environmental and sustainability issues, our customers value us for our deep understanding and breadth of services covering the entire value chain from evidence, policy & strategy to implementation.

We are currently looking for a Development manager to join our Digital services team.

Key responsibilities

As Digital Development Manager within Ricardo, you’ll be comfortable combining your strong backend development skills with operational day to day management of developers. You’ll split your time effectively to ensure that our development processes are being adhered to whilst taking on some technical implementations yourself. For this key management role within the Digital Services team, you’ll help shape and influence continuous improvement of our development approaches and Digital software development team. You will contribute to planning and prioritising the development tasks, ensuring the right skills and resources across our software portfolio to meet a diverse range of project challenges. You will ensure consistent quality standards are met, using the most appropriate technologies that meet customer expectations, making use of the tools and services we provide for the business. You will also have responsibility to define the plan and facilitate execution of release cycles, helping to ensure stakeholders are fully informed on their role within that process. You will get involved in hands-on development, helping the team out where required, particularly during busier periods.

Key competences and experiences

You will understand the importance and have the ability to create strong working relationships through your proven relationship management skills. You’ll need to be a self-starter who seeks to continuously improve themselves and others, always seeking a more efficient way to deliver work. You will demonstrate your expertise, giving confidence in your abilities by consistently delivering value while helping to build the understanding of others. You are an individual who can reassess your priorities seeking to always deliver the best commercial outcome for Ricardo and our customers.

Your time will be split between developing new innovative solutions and shaping team development effort for our respective open source and C#.net development teams. Typically, you can expect a70-30 split between management and development tasks respectively. You will need strong commercial experience of agile working principles (incl: scrum and Kanban), and evidence of these processes in previous roles. You’ll have experience of modern development tools, processes and practices with the ability to understand requirements and contribute to solution planning.  You will also have a good understanding of the digital marketplace, trends, tools and innovations in order to contribute to the technical strategy for the business.

• Ensure on-time high-quality code releases.
• Ensure support requests are scheduled and managed in line with SLAs and customer expectations, finding the right balance between development and support effort to minimise developer interruptions.
• Understand and balance the difference between writing perfect code vs business needs.
• Act as team leader for a subset of Digital Services and regularly meet with those team members to provide coaching/performance management.
• Assist in the recruitment (interviews, managing tasks) of new members of the development team when required.
• Overseeing development projects from design to post-deployment, flagging issues/ risks to management team as they are observed.
• The design and implementation of complex systems throughout their lifecycle.
• Deploying new projects into the existing systems infrastructure.
• Writing code specifications and planning and running sprints.

Skills and Behaviours:

• Proven experience in modern PHP-based MVC frameworks (preferably Symfony).

• A knowledgeable Web developer who understands the following to an advanced level

• PHP OOP, MySQL, JavaScript, AJAX, XML, API-platform

• Kubernetes, containerisation, CI/CD

• Knowledge of web standards/accessibility, Privacy-by-Design.

• Working knowledge of GitHub/ GitLab and CI/CD integrations

• Ability to manage work through Jira and ensure development team follow set processes.

• Team leadership experience

• Experience embedding technical processes and procedures

Desirable

• Previous team leadership experience is preferred but not essential - you will likely have a small team of direct reports
• Drupal 8,9,10 (preferred but not essential)
• GIS mapping software integration (ArcGIS, GeoServer, Open Layers)
• Experience working with c#.net developers and SQL DBAs would be preferred.
• API development experience is preferred but not essential

Working here

Ricardo is an exciting and rewarding place to work and you have the opportunity to make a difference. You will work with teams of talented, dedicated, and supportive individuals. Alongside having a fantastic opportunity to develop your career with us through our broad range of projects, mentoring opportunities and a personalised approach to your learning and development. We are always keen to hear from people who have driven, ambition and a flair for innovative thinking.

Wellbeing and work life balance

We offer flexible approaches to work, whether that's working from home, being in the office, or as a hybrid worker. We're happy to discuss flexible working arrangements. Wellbeing is at the core to our culture, allowing employees to flourish and to achieve their full potential. Our People are important to us, and we take pride in our wellbeing programmes and policies that support individuals including flexible working, carers policy, mental health first aiders and readily available support through our extensive Employee Assistance programme.

Diversity, Equality and Inclusion statement

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer, we believe in each person's potential, and we'll help you reach yours. We have an ambitious diversity, equality, and inclusion approach as explained here. We value diversity; recognising that a more diverse workforce creates a richer and more varied working environment. Diversity also drives innovation, by allowing us to offer our clients the best consultancy service that we can. As part of our commitment to engage positively and pro-actively with all our employees and ensure a culture of inclusivity, we are a recognised as a 'disability confident' employer.

Benefits

Our core benefits include 25 days' annual leave, plus 8 flexible bank holidays, a competitive company pension scheme, life assurance and professional subscriptions reimbursement. We also offer a wide range of flexible benefits to suit your lifestyle.

Once you have submitted your application a member of our Recruitment Team will be in touch. Please be aware that the timing can vary dependent on the volume of applications that we receive for each role and in some cases, we may start to review applications prior to the closing date.