Lead Developer

While you’ll have heard our name, there’s a lot you probably don’t know about NEXT. Like how we create most of our systems ourselves – whether it’s a website, mobile app or application. What’s more, we’re growing. Fast. And it’s the kind of growth and investment that is exciting for everyone in our business.
 
About the Team 

Our eCommerce websites and apps have grown steadily over the past 10 years to become one of the largest online retail platforms in the UK. We currently sell to 70 international markets, offering our 6 million active customers a personalised shopping experience and the ability to purchase from a wide range of products using multiple delivery methods and payment types. 

About the role

As a Lead Developer you will be working in an agile team and working alongside other Developers to lead and build upon our quality centric eCommerce platform. You will be responsible for developing the user interface of our website platform and will have the opportunity to design architecture and select tools, to improve our skill set and improve our platform in line with the future road map. The enterprise platform is currently used to drive numerous sites, serving millions of users worldwide.

As a passionate developer with a keen mindset to improve, you’ll enjoy working as part of a team. Comfortable with modern technologies and tooling, you’ll use best practices to improve the user experience and efficiency of development teams. You will help provide development support to internal users of our Content Management System, as well as offering out-of-hours cover during seasonal events and busy trading periods. You’ll also use your expertise and experience to help us continually improve our processes and working practices, actively enabling the department to become as efficient and effective as it can be.

Criteria

Essential

• Strong experience of Java, JSON, Javascript and Freemarker Templates.
• Technical experience in both front-end and back-end development
• Some experience of developing for high performance sites.
• Awareness and practice of UI performance best practices
• A desire to write readable, maintainable, modular and extendable code
• Good knowledge in industry best practices in development.
• Experience in creating a responsive site with multiple viewports.
• Strong analytical skills and problem solving aptitude
• Experience in mentoring junior developers on development methodologies and optimization techniques
• Be able to work closely with Product Owner and Stakeholders to understand the business needs and deliver solutions.

Desirable

• An understanding of Content Management Systems and features
• An understanding of industry standard web accessibility, web design & usability
• Experience developing and deploying features to applications and sites.
• Experience in working Agile team