Engineering Manager

At Smart, our mission is to transform retirement, savings and financial wellbeing, across all generations, around the world.

THE ROLE

Are you a technology leader ready to help build a platform that is changing the entire industry of Pensions? As an Engineering Manager within Smart Pension, you will work with multiple teams to make a difference.

Responsibilities

• Lead 1 to 3 small teams of software engineers in development and test to deliver high quality software using agile and lean principles and methodologies
• Some of your team members will be local (London, UK), others may be remote
• Develop high performing team(s) through mentoring, feedback and performance management
• Oversee the design, development, testing and release of software using engineering best practices
• Serve as a technology leader with a strong focus on quality, performance, scalability & maintainability
• Own the delivery and quality of what your teams produce
• Coordinate work with other managers, across different areas and domains
• Work close with Product Owners to build roadmaps that the teams will deliver against
• Instil excellence into the processes, methodologies, standards and technology choices embraced by the team
• Drive design and planning activities by removing ambiguities, resolving dependency questions and providing high-level engineering estimates
• Directly report to a Associate Director of Engineering

Requirements

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

The skills, experience and aptitudes we are looking for are listed below. If it all sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you.

Please don’t be discouraged from applying if you don’t meet every single one of these criteria – having a ‘can do’ attitude is sometimes more important than being able to tick every box.

• You view team success as your number one goal!
• You are an engineering manager who embraces servant leadership principles and leads high performing engineering teams, with a focus on Continuous Delivery, Lean, TDD and other Agile development techniques
• Lead by example, support your team, and prioritise their success above your own
• Who are passionate about technology and leadership in equal measure
• You have led and coached engineers to be better every day - kaizen! Continuous improvement
• Experience in managing complex projects, delivering products and features both from greenfields and building on existing platforms
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills enabling you to translate technical concepts for business groups, present to executive audiences or guide discussion with your team
• Experience with object-oriented design with a bias for rapid development, platform reusability, maintainability, and supportability
• A background in web application development using an OO language (e.g. Ruby, Java, etc), HTML, CSS and JS frameworks
• Experience working within a complex domain, where understanding and managing risks is crucial

WHO WE ARE

We work in partnerships with governments and financial institutions in the UK and internationally. Our cloud-native digital platform is revolutionising how people around the world think about, and save for, their retirement.

At heart, we’re a financial technology business. What we do is all about innovation, and using the power of digital change to put the customer first. Our Engineers will tell you that working at Smart gives you the opportunity to play your part in developing world-class technological solutions, working with – and learning from – like-minded people.

You’ll also find that, across our business, our colleagues love Smart’s culture, and how what we do means better financial outcomes for savers. That feels worthwhile, and it means that what we do, collectively, goes way beyond the nine to five of a typical working day.

Don’t just take our word for it – you can see what our colleagues say about working at Smart on the Great Place To Work website, Linkedin Life and Glassdoor.

ENGINEERING AT SMART

At Smart, we focus on developing high quality software that delivers the best value for our customers and we don't cut costs – quality is essential to everything we do, working software that always works! We’re disrupting an industry that has been slow to adopt new technology and as a result we are recognised as a technology company that does pensions.

We started with a clean sheet and followed engineering best practices from the beginning. Our approach to code is simple, keep it clean and ensure it has thorough test coverage. We don't ship code just to hit a deadline. Savings is a long term project, and we're handling peoples retirement income, so the stability, security and accuracy of our platform is crucial. We also welcome change and innovation in engineering and are constantly adapting to suit new technologies or ways of working.

Some exciting aspects of our engineering practices are:

We use contemporary tools such as AWS, GitHub, Semaphore CI, Datadog, Docker, Kubernetes, to name a few.

We are able to maintain at least 96% test coverage of our application through collaboration and strong code review practices, meaning we can focus on features rather than bug fixing.

Our team is passionate about OOP, TDD and DDD.

We ship software continuously, releasing new features to production up to 30 times a day.

We follow Agile practices and have a strong DevOps culture in place.

We have great internal mobility, meaning that we are able to give you exposure to the aspects that you would like to improve on or learn about. Progression and development are key!

We believe in diversity and inclusion, in and out. We have a diverse engineering workforce and over 80% of our Engineering team volunteered their time to be coaches at the recent Rails Girls London event – a free workshop aimed at making technology more approachable for women.

We empower our engineers to propose new ideas. For instance, we run hackathons where in 24 hours anyone can build and present new ways of thinking to the senior management team – most of these ideas are implemented and in production today.

Benefits

At Smart, one of the eight principles we work to is “We want happy and good people in our team”. We created a list of benefits that helps us achieve this goal:

• 25 days’ holiday per year, increasing with length of service.
• £500 annual training budget to spend on your professional development
• Extensive private healthcare, including dental, eyecare and EAP
• Enhanced sick leave (three months’ pay per year)
• Enhanced maternity and paternity (maternity – 6 months fully paid/paternity – 3 weeks fully paid)
• Death in service insurance cover
• Fully-paid five-week sabbatical after five years of employment
• In office wellbeing, such as manicures, massages and barbers. We also serve free lunch, breakfasts and social drinks weekly.
• Smart employees also enjoy a 50% discount on orders from our sister company Arena Flowers, Britain's most ethical florist. They offer unique hand-tied bouquets, luxury flowers, letterbox flowers, plants and gifts to spend on friends and loved ones or even for yourself.

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We think Smart is an awesome place to work. If it sounds like somewhere you’d like to work, too, and if you’re ready to play your part in our continued success in the future, then naturally we’d love to meet you.