Software Applications Lead

Software Applications Lead

Based: Offices in London and High Wycombe with UK remote working available

Term: Permanent, Full time

Salary: Negotiable + excellent benefits

Focusrite is empowering more music makers.

We are looking for people to lead our engineering teams to build on our success, as we inspire artists around the world and remove barriers to their creativity. This is a new role to support our growing community of engineers working on software applications to support our connected products with a wide and varied tech stack that includes desktop and mobile applications.

What you’ll be doing:
We are looking for someone to work closely with and support our Engineering teams, partnering with Product and Engineering management to ensure we are diligent about our trade-offs and that dependencies and communication are managed effectively and openly. The focus of this role is software applications but awareness of hardware products and embedded software would be beneficial. You will report to a Software Engineering Manager and work closely with them and others across the Engineering department.

The successful candidate will be responsible for leading the evolution of the technical stack of our cross-platform applications as our strategic direction changes. This will require consideration of the high-level user interfaces, down to the lower-level networking protocols, and the layers of abstraction and concurrency that tie it all together. The role would see the individual contribute to system architecture as well as the application codebases, pairing and participating in code reviews within our teams.

Your strategic insight, and awareness of design integrations and interfaces, will help identify the necessary enablers for the teams – those things the application architecture needs to feature, and that teams need to function effectively.

Using quarterly team synchronisation, engineering catchups, and team product reviews, you will keep the teams connected and up to date as the applications evolve and help ensure that any architectural issues the teams encounter during the implementation are addressed. At team level, you will participate in their solution definition and implementation, and update the architecture with feedback as the teams design, build and test their work.

Key activities include:

• Technical leadership across a number of teams that ensures our software application design and delivery are well considered.
• Ensuring our software application development approaches are aligned to our product and engineering strategy.
• Being a team enabler – ensuring each team is aware of the bigger product picture of which they are a part, and able to contribute effectively to that system-level design.
• Embedding yourself in those teams at key points in the development cycle, to help in the hands-on implementation of key architectural components.

 An ideal candidate is likely to be:

• Experiences with designing and engineering desktop applications. Working with mobile applications is a bonus.
• Passionate and knowledgeable about music and audio technology.
• Experienced in software platform engineering techniques and design methodologies including hands-on development experience in C++. Working with Web-centric technologies such as Typescript is a bonus.
• Experienced with the integration of software with hardware products.
• An advocate for automated testing from unit testing to hardware in the loop, and familiar with principles of Continuous Integration.
• A people person, with excellent communication skills and with a proven track record of helping people and teams work well together.
• Flexible, and able to effectively prioritise and schedule across multiple projects.
• An advocate for good documentation and the importance of knowledge sharing.
• Committed to personal development and aware of the latest industry trends.
• Methodical and rigorous, with a logical approach to problem solving.

Benefits include flexible/hybrid working, company pension, life insurance, private healthcare, enhanced Maternity and Paternity pay, employee purchase scheme, group bonus scheme, company music events, offsite company parties and free lunch in the canteen. We arrange company training sessions and encourage personal development.

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