Role: Software Engineering Manager
Location: London – Hybrid Office & Home
Who Are We?
mkodo builds world class apps, middleware and digital products in the global lottery, betting, and
gaming space. We have an open, supportive, dynamic culture where talented people are trusted to contribute to the team and company by carrying out their roles in a professional, collaborative, and skilled manner. We value the expertise of our team members and offer opportunities for personal development and career progression within the company.
Acquired in February 2020, by Pollard Banknote Limited (PBL), a major supplier to the global lottery
industries, brought mkodo strong financial security, access to resources and clients at a global level.
About the role:
We’re looking for a driven Software Engineering Manager to support our ambitious growth goals for 2024. Reporting to the Head of Engineering, the Software Engineering Manager leads a high performing large team, or multiple smaller teams, of Software Engineers, Tech Leads, and Principal Engineers working with a combination of iOS, Swift, Android, Kotlin, React, Java and AWS.
Software Engineering Manager roles often focus on a couple of three main areas including Delivery, People and Technology. mkodo's Software Engineering Managers focus primarily on Delivery and People. You can get involved in Technology, but it is not a focus or requirement of the role. You are accountable for ensuring the team delivers their projects on-time and on-budget. This is not a hands-on developer role. You are expected to have a large impact on the success of your team and the wider engineering community and organisation. You are fully comfortable with modern software delivery and management practices and have successfully delivered many large projects.
An enthusiastic & diligent role model, the Software Engineering Manager will support and grow our engineers to develop award winning apps and services. A people first manager with an empathetic principle-centred leadership style. It’s important you evangelise engineering excellence with an automation first approach, challenging Engineers to be their best selves. The Software Engineering Manager acts as hiring manager, partnering with HR to lead on Engineering talent recruitment. You’ll foster a high bar for Engineering excellence on your team, holding them to account to deliver.
This is an important role for the company to ensure that we deliver outstanding products to the thousands of customers who use our Apps. The Software Engineering Manager is accountable for managing performance across the engineering community. Rewarding good performance and identifying and managing performance improvements where needed.
Main responsibilities are:
- Accountable for their teams delivering projects on-time and on-budget, ensuring the team knows the milestone dates and the contribution they need to make to hit them.
- Identifying and removing issues and keeping the team moving towards hitting milestone dates.
- Line managing a large team, or multiple smaller teams, of Software Engineers
- Ensuring the team is focused on high value work.
- Communicate progress and achievements to all levels, including execs, and present clear and concise project updates.
- Strive to improve efficiency and sustainability of processes, and to reduce waste.
- Foster a culture of continuous improvement: Using retrospective data, project metrics, bug escape metrics and regular operational catch ups across the business, gather actionable data, track trends, and analyse data to demonstrate continuous improvement to process, approaches, and tooling across teams.
- Working with the Head of Engineering, contribute to, and maintain, the strategy that will be rolled out and inspire your team to act on an energised vision of Software Engineering.
- Lead and direct Principal and Lead Software Engineers, and Software Engineers of all levels, providing coaching and support to drive the capability of your Engineering team, ensuring appropriate training and continuous learning is in place to support growth and succession planning of individuals.
- Role model the mkodo behaviours and values and hold others accountable for them.
- Create and maintain a culture of resilience, trust and psychological safety on your team, empowering engineers to experiment and fail fast.
- Provide technical guidance and direction to the engineering team, while promoting a culture of innovation and creativity.
- Partner with HR to attract, retain and develop top talent, as well as manage performance and development of team members, both technically and behaviourally.
- Support and manage career progression using a Career Ladder framework.
- Ensure that processes meet necessary compliance guidelines (i.e., ISO27001 and PCI Compliance) and are being always followed by teams.
- Identify areas of strategic technical debt, do the cost/benefit analysis for resolving this debt and communicate suggested timelines for prioritizing this to the management team.
- Communicate technical information to non-technical stakeholders, including customers.
- Partner with the other functional leads and managers across the organisation, developing a cross-functional team relationship that sets the bar for your direct reports. Ensuring you have full visibility of the conversations with Project Managers and Product Owners about roadmaps, the resource plans for your team and regularly check that workload and capacity are matched.
- Support the Head of Engineering to manage effective resource model usage, with a mix of permanent UK mkodo people, and offshore/nearshore resources, in addition to using shared services within the PBL where applicable.
- Develop your skills using training mkodo offers and be willing to ask questions when you are not sure or when something is in your way.
- Support mkodo in the implementation and ongoing maintenance of its ISO27001 Information Security Management System (ISMS).
- Adhere to all relevant mkodo ISO27001 Information Security Management System (ISMS) policies, procedures and requirements at all times.
- Complete any reasonable tasks relating to the mkodo ISO27001 Information Security Management System (ISMS).
Key Skills & Attributes:
Must have:
- Experience leading a team to deliver large projects on time and on budget.
- Experience managing fixed scope projects.
- Confident manager with a good coaching, mentoring and feedback ethos who can build high performing teams, and manage internal and external relationships.
- Strong leadership, mentoring and interpersonal skills, with the ability to lead and motivate a team towards common goals.
- Critical thinking and analytical skills
- Clear communicator who can inspire others through a multitude of mediums, be enthusiastic, provide context and then deliver on it through the team.
- Experience of managing teams of software engineers of all levels working on multiple projects - including complex problem solving, resource planning, adapting quickly to change, raising risk and mitigations, working with conviction, and working to tight deadlines.
- Experience of performance management, including making difficult decisions and having difficult conversations.
- Passion for people-first leadership, and commitment to fostering a positive, inclusive and high-performing team culture.
- Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic and constantly evolving environment.
- Excellent first-hand knowledge of software development techniques and methodologies throughout the SDLC, mobile development would be a distinctive advantage.
- Able to multitask, prioritise work in sometimes pressurised situations.
- Strong experience in managing and mentoring teams of Software Engineers in a fast-paced environment.
- Experience in client facing situations.
- Ability to manage and lead on multiple projects in various stages simultaneously.
- Proven track record of successfully recruiting diverse candidates at all levels balanced with technical and soft skills.
Desirable:
- Our tech stack is iOS, Swift, Android, Kotlin, React, Java and AWS. Experience of one or more of those is desirable but not required if you have a strong technical background working in a modern language following good practices and principles.
- Business and industry acumen, knowing mkodo, mkodo’s offerings and products and mkodo’s customers.
- Domain or product knowledge of apps, middleware and digital products in the global lottery, betting, and gaming space.
- Experience in managing teams of Software Engineers from third party offshore/nearshore providers, as a supplement to UK based FTE, would be advantageous.
- Working as part of a group of global companies, supporting an aligned strategic direction, would also be helpful.
Benefits:
mkodo is a great place to work, with excellent benefits comprising:
? Hybrid/Flexible Working
? Quarterly team events
? Birthday Holiday
? Christmas Day-Off
? Generous Holiday Allowance
? Tech Loan Scheme
? Performance bonus & profit share scheme
? Cycle to Work scheme
? Travel Loan scheme
? Supplies of fresh fruits, cereals, biscuits, nibbles, etc. in the offices
? Relevant training and training budget.
? Digital Nomad Policy
? Generous refer a friend scheme
We encourage growth and progression because we value our colleagues and know that we best
succeed when achieving and developing together.
Please note that visa sponsorship is not provided. The candidates must have the right to work in the country they apply. Please submit your resume in English language. All applications will be handled with confidentiality. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.