Lead Technical Architect (MERN)

Job Description:

Reports to: Engineering Director

Team Management- Yes

Key Relationships: Product, Delivery, Architecture, Security, DevOps / SRE

Role Overview 

• As the SME of MERN within the Dentsu ecosystem, you will manage and mentor software teams delivering a combination of applications and systems for use by end users
• You will be a strong advocate for the team and share practices, ideas and successes with other product delivery teams.
• You will provide technical leadership across workstream discussions, ensuring seamless collaboration where technical direction is required across multiple teams building applications over our platform.
• Working with Solution Architects and Developers, you will actively participate in brainstorming and solution design sessions to address the needs and technical challenges facing those teams.  You will help drive the team to agreed outcomes and a technical way forward.
• Working with the Product team, you will be adept at solving business problems with software in the shortest sustainable lead-time and be able to explain technical solutions clearly and succinctly to business audiences and technical teams alike.
• Working with Architects and Engineering team, you will create the Technical Vision and Roadmap for the Platform Team, driving the focus on its objectives and progress against delivery.

Responsibilities   

• Ensuring team composition and skills are adequate, line management of your team of Engineering Leads, who will look to you as a mentor to develop their skills for regular 1:1s and as a coach to guide them through the software development lifecycle. 
• Work with the Engineering team to ensure the platform services are scalable, resilient, well documented and easy to consume and to maintain.
• Collaborate with other Technology functions (e.g. Architecture, DevOps, Security) across different geographies, timezones and cultures to deliver secure, reliable, robust, scalable code which can be built, tested and deployed into Production using automation and CI/CD pipelines and Agile delivery practices.
• Own end-to-end architecture for large-scale MERN platforms and digital products.
• • Remain hands-on in architecture, coding, code reviews, troubleshooting, POCs and critical
• feature delivery (approximately 70% of role).
• • Define target-state architecture, microservices patterns, API standards, event-driven
• architecture and cloud-native design principles.
• • Drive technical decisions around scalability, security, resiliency, observability and performance.
• • Lead engineering teams across design, development, testing, deployment and production
• support.
• • Establish coding standards, design reviews, architecture governance and reusable frameworks.
• • Mentor architects and senior engineers and build technical capability across teams.
• • Collaborate with Product, Delivery, Business and Client stakeholders to translate business
• goals into technical roadmaps.
• • Manage technical risks, dependencies, estimations and executive communications.
• • Present architecture recommendations to senior leadership and clients

Must Have Skills

• Proven experience managing small software teams and mentoring engineers in enterprise web development and services development using loosely coupled systems.
• 12+ years overall experience with 4+ years in Technical Architect or Lead Architect roles.
• Expert MERN stack knowledge: MongoDB, Mongoose, Express.js, React.js, Node.js and TypeScript.
• Strong expertise in distributed systems, microservices, REST APIs and GraphQL.
• Hands-on experience with Azure or other public cloud platforms.
• CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code and DevSecOps practices.
• Kafka or equivalent event streaming platforms.
• Deep understanding of SOLID principles, design patterns, TDD/BDD and automated testing.
• Experience designing high-volume, highly available systems.
• Strong communication, stakeholder management and client-facing skills.

Desirable

• Working knowledge of API gateways (Kong or equivalent), ABAC solutions (Symphonic or equivalent), CMS platforms (Strapi or equivalent)

• Working on Developer Portals or documentation relating to shared development services
• Experience of Docker and/or Kubernetes an advantage.
• Working knowledge of DataBricks/Spark (using Python and associated frameworks)
• Working knowledge of Azure Data Lake and Azure Blob storage

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