Lead Software Engineer

Company Description

We're ASOS. We blend our flair for fashion with our love of cutting- edge technology, but more importantly were interested in how we can bring the best out of you.

We exist to give people the confidence to be whoever they want to be, and that goes for our people too. At ASOS, you're free to be your true self without judgment, and channel your creativity into a platform used by millions.

ASOS Technology is going through an exciting period of transition and major investment. This includes several strategic programmes to deliver the amazing technology and business solutions to boost our aspiring global growth plans following the past 20 years of providing the ultimate fashion experience for 20somethings.

Last year, we shipped 73m orders to our 20m (and growing) customers, processed 80m units of returned stock, and on our last Black Friday weekend, our systems processed over 1m orders, 42 every second at peak – pretty cool huh?!

Let our Director of Architecture, Dave Green explain how our Microservices architecture has been designed with Microsoft Azure…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PigmI6APbQ8

Job Description

As a Lead Software Engineer in one of our 30 engineering platforms operating at hyper-scale receiving thousands of requests per second, you'll be a hands-on Lead engineer pushing best practice engineering processes and approaches, and driving the capabilities of the platform, ensuring continuous product improvement and ongoing development of engineers through coaching, mentoring and pairing. From problem-solving to new concept ideas, you have the genuine opportunity to unleash your full potential and creativity on a variety of ASOS software projects.

Stock & fulfilment platform

You will be joining the ever-growing Stock & Fulfilment Platform, which owns services that power various front-end and back-end features, such as availability of each product, reservation, fulfilment, delivery and returns of customer orders.

To handle the ever-increasing demands of performance and availability, we're embarking on a journey of discovery and re-architecting to find the most appropriate tech for us. There is a lot of opportunity to shape the technical choices we make and the direction we take, so we can scale and grow to meet the growing demands of ASOS and our amazing customers. You will learn and help shape how stock, fulfilment and warehouses play a crucial part in the customer experience.

We are currently investing in a major re-platforming programme on our .NET architecture. We build our solutions in the Azure cloud, primarily using Azure Functions running images built using Docker and .NET Core. We back this up using resources including Azure Service Bus, Cosmos DB and Azure Key Vault. We monitor real time usage and performance using Application insights and deploy using Terraform and Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines.

We take a test-first approach to programming and use best practices like TDD, ATDD and DDD. If you have the technical skills we're looking for and a passion for Agile delivery in fast-paced environments, come join us!

What you'll be doing:

• Working yours and other development teams to define, prioritise and manage the teams' development backlogs 'with an agile mindset'
• Collaborating with third party systems providers and in-house agile development teams, you will work to deliver business requirements across the entire project and product lifecycles, from initial discovery through to launch and the measurement of customer impact
• Elicit, understand, document, and prioritise high-level business requirements and turn them into accurate user stories that the Agile teams you work with can deliver
• Organise, lead and participate in Agile ceremonies such as refinement sessions, daily team stand-ups, sprint reviews, retrospectives, and product demonstrations
• Drive collaborative discussions with team members to contribute to technical strategy and the roadmap, as well as business requirements
• Ensure all functional changes have accompanying non-functional requirements clearly defined to ensure the service is fit for purpose, to deliver business value, with a keen eye on performance and security given the domain and volume of transactions it handles
• Review feedback on user stories delivered, demonstrating product deliverables, and sharing your team's success stories with the rest of the business
• Manage stakeholder relationships and needs at various levels throughout the business
• Own the area's requirements, by establishing and maintaining a strong relationship with Product Management, continually enhance your expertise of the area and assess the potential impact of any changes
• Work closely with Project Managers to create a fantastic and collaborative working environment
• Delivering customer value quickly, iterating and learning – being comfortable at pushing back and challenging the status quo
• Able to articulate technical pieces of work specifically illustrating the business value
• Work closely with the Solution Architect on defining a technical deliverable in line with architecture led principles
• Collaborate with QA engineers and Lead / Principal Test Engineers to adopt and refine a test-first (TDD) culture within your engineering team
• Identify and support team growth opportunities, through recruitment, personal development, mentoring and outreach to suitable partners including Engineering Managers, Platform Leads and Principal Software Engineers

Qualifications

Skills

• Messaging (e.g. Azure Service Bus, AWS SQS / SNS, Kafka)
• Cloud computing (e.g. Azure App Service, Azure Functions, AWS Lambda etc)
• Cloud databases (e.g. CosmosDB, DynamoDB, AWS RedShift, Azure SQL Server)
• Terraform
• Azure DevOps
• GitHub
• Docker
• Performance/load testing
• Design patterns (architecture, system, security, networking)
• Site Reliability Engineering (scalability, availability, costs, maintainability)
• Cloud-based monitoring (Azure, AppInsights, Grafana, New Relic)
• Kanban / Scrum
• Software Craftsmanship
• Coaching and mentoring
• Drive quality and best practices on complex projects

We'd like to meet someone with…

• Experience working with a backend development team
• Experience across the full project lifecycle (from initiation through to benefits realisation) within both structured and agile project environments
• An appreciation of the business context you're working in, considering all perspectives, and being clear on the 'why'
• Experience of line management and coaching (desirable)
• Experience of working on large scale cross functional change, working closely with other tech domains
• Keep it general with "agile"
• Again, encourage the use of "agile" rather than "scrum" specifically

Additional Information

What's in it for you?

• Generous salary, bonus and pension-matching, life insurance, free private medical care, cycle to work scheme + much more
• Bespoke flexible benefits scheme catered to your personal needs
• New and updated major life events policies for UK ASOSers including pregnancy-loss, reproductive health, exceptional leave and menopause
• Best in class Learning & Development schemes and career development programmes
• Tech Develops days – last Friday of the month dedicated to developing yourself and others around Tech including external speakers and exclusive Microsoft training material
• Communities of Practice across Tech, from QA, BA, DevOps, Cyber Security and accessibility to Women (and Families) In Tech, Diversity & Inclusion, Engineering Managers, Coaching or Agile Ways of Working
• 25 days holiday, annual milestone rewards and never work your birthday again
• Free top-of-the-range onsite gym, plus great value personal training and wellness treatment rooms
• Huge staff discounts, sample sales and early access to exclusive partnerships

We want our people to be whoever they want to be. That's why we're committed to creating a truly inclusive culture at ASOS, but how're we doing it?Through our Fashion with Integrity strategy we are driving diversity, equity and inclusion across every aspect of ASOS and ensuring every ASOSer can be their authentic self at work. We want our people to be whoever they want to be, because we believe people who bring their best selves to work, do their best work. We're proud members of Inclusive Companies, are Disability Confident Committed and have signed the Business in the Community Race at Work Charter. We've also recently been placed 8th in the Inclusive Top 50 Companies Employer List too.There are safe space employee networks and we host a monthly DEI events series to help support and celebrate all of our people. We are constantly listening to our people, evolving, changing and taking a flexible approach to how we make ASOS truly inclusive.