Senior Software Engineer, App - Back End

Senior Software Engineer, App - Back End
Title: Senior Software Engineer
Department: Technology
Reporting line: Engineering Manager

For over 160 years, The Telegraph’s stories, dispatches, interviews, and investigations have set the agenda, sparked debate, and provided generations of readers with a trusted source of news, information, and opinion.

In 2018, TMG set out a bold vision to become a subscription-first business with the goal to reach one million subscriptions by 2023 — which we have achieved. We wouldn’t be one of the world's most successful media organisations without the talent, determination, and creative spirit of our people. As our readers’ needs evolve, it's more important than ever that we recruit original thinkers and innovative individuals who can keep us at the forefront of our industry. That means not only journalists but also marketers, analysts, designers, engineers, and much more.

We want to foster the diversity of thought through our people and create inclusive working environments that allow everyone to be their authentic selves at work while creating a sense of belonging — to ensure we have the highest-performing teams.

Our Benefits
The nature of our industry means life at the Telegraph Media Group is fast-paced, demanding, and interesting. We also want it to be rewarding for everyone who works here. From dynamic working opportunities, medical cover, and parental leave (six months fully paid maternity leave and enhanced paternity/partner leave), to life assurance and season ticket loans, you can choose from a range of flexible benefits, designed to support your lifestyle and help you achieve a healthy work-life balance.

Training and Development
With support from your manager and colleagues, you’ll also have access to a variety of training and development opportunities through The Academy. Covering a range of personal and professional skills, our courses enable you to develop an enjoyable and rewarding career.

Our Commitment to Inclusion
We want you to feel you belong here and welcome candidates from all backgrounds. Our organisation is on a continuous journey to achieve this sense of belonging, with focused inclusion policies, training, and internal networks. We believe it’s not only the right thing to do but that there’s a strong business case to support it. Because if you feel you belong, you’ll feel more comfortable, so you’ll be more likely to achieve your best.

We have a number of internal networks that are totally inclusive and open for anyone to join. These include internal inclusion networks covering:

• Employees from ethnic minority backgrounds

• Working families

• LGBTQ+

• Disabilities and long-term conditions

• Gender

• Well-being

• Women in tech

Your well-being is paramount, so we have trained over 100 Mental Health First Aiders in the last two years to help support our employees.

The Government Disability Confident employer scheme helps identify employers who are actively committing to inclusion and diversity in the workplace. The Telegraph Media Group has been certified as a Level 3 Disability Confident Leader, for our work in recruiting, retaining and developing disabled staff.

Role Purpose and Overview
At the Telegraph we build an amazing, engaging, fast, reliable and secure digital product (website and app) that showcases our journalism, encourages subscription and makes that process as seamless as possible.

As a back-end engineer working on the App, your primary purpose will be to develop backend domain software applying modern best practices to deliver quality user experiences to support the Telegraph's product and subscription strategies.

Our Engineering principles are based on BUILD it, RUN it, OWN it.

You will ensure your code is delivered to the highest standard in line with the product goals, on time and within budget, and you will be part of the rota to provide technical support for the systems in production.

You will collaborate in the development of our performance and verification pipelines, and the cloud infrastructure required to run these, with the constant aim of full automation.

You will collaborate with other engineers, sharing your knowledge and experience.

Above all, you’ll want to make The Telegraph better — which may sometimes involve challenging the status quo.

Key Responsibilities
You will:

• Design and develop robust, maintainable backend systems and microservices for a mobile application, ensuring scalability and performance, and adopting modern best practices in your designs and implementations.

• Work closely within a cross-functional team of Delivery Managers, Business Analysts and Engineers while collaborating with Product Managers and Designers to ship product features, translating business requirements into actionable engineering tasks.

• Write clean, efficient, and well-documented code in a collaborative environment, ensuring your code and that of the engineering team are to a high standard and in line with the product and technology standards and goals.

• Participate in and lead software architecture discussions, technical planning, and design reviews

• Help define, roll out and evolve our testing strategy.

• Seek ways to improve the team’s processes, ensuring best practices are shared across the wider technology team.

• Provide 2nd line operational support as part of the on-call duty and proactively prevent, address and resolve production issues if they arise.

• Work with a DevOps mindset to help build, run and own your code in a production environment.

• Work with 3rd party technology partners and suppliers as required.

• Keep up with the latest technology innovations in media, cloud and software development.

• Be an active member of the Telegraph Engineering Team, contributing to the vibrant culture and promoting the Telegraph Engineering brand through public channels such as open-source communities, blogs and meetups.

Essential Skills and Experiences Required for the Role
You will:

• Have an expert understanding of internet technologies, architectures and general application development.

• Be able to apply agile development principles and champion modern best software practices to continuously improve our software and the development processes.

• Have a strong understanding of the full software development life-cycle and be eager to influence the processes adopted by the team in delivering projects.

• Act as a strong advocate for quality in product development, continuous integration and automation and have a deep understanding of how to achieve these through the latest test strategies and using automation frameworks.

• Collaborate in all aspects of software development with a focus on quality, performance and verification pipelines with the constant aim of full automation.

• Contribute towards architectural designs and development techniques and standards.

• Have experience of the day-to-day on-call operations which includes ensuring you and your team have the training, tools and processes to quickly respond to any issues that may arise.

• Be able to communicate technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.

• Be an advocate for the importance of DevOps.

• Have a flexible attitude and be willing to tackle new challenges with energy and urgency with a desire to develop and learn new skills.

• Be team-oriented, keen to share your knowledge and open to giving and receiving continuous feedback.

Technical Skills Required for the Role

• Deep proficiency in Java, with working knowledge of MongoDB and JavaScript

• Familiar with frameworks such as SpringBoot and JUnit

• A firm believer in test-driven development and continuous deployment

• Familiarity with Docker, Jenkins and GitHub Actions for CI/CD and containerised development

• A solid understanding of RESTful APIs and microservices architecture

• Experience in software delivery within a high web traffic/high volume transactional online/digital/media environment

• Best practice knowledge of security, performance and accessibility

• Been part of a high-performing, autonomous, Agile development Team

Additional Skills Useful for the Role

• Working knowledge of cloud platforms and serverless architecture with GCP and/or AWS

• Use of Server Side Includes/Edge Side Includes (SSI/ESI)

• Previous usage of workflow tools such as JIRA and/or Trello

• Performance and Load Testing (JMeter/Blazemeter)

• Maven Build tool

• Swagger

• Monitoring & Alerting (Datadog, New Relic, Elasticsearch, CloudWatch)

• Caching (Akamai, Fastly, CloudFront)

• Exposure to Adobe Experience Manager and/or NextJS

• Cypress

The Telegraph’s goal is to foster a diverse and inclusive workplace and we are committed to building a team that reflects a wide variety of skills, perspectives, and backgrounds.

We are an equal opportunities employer, hiring solely on merit and business need. We encourage applications regardless of sex, gender identity, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, religion or belief, marital status, pregnancy, parenthood, and disability. If you require reasonable adjustments in any recruitment process with us, please make us aware.