Principal Developer

Principal Software Developer 

Lifecycle provide billing solutions to a number of high-profile customers in the telecommunications industry. Due to continued growth and increasing sales success, we are looking for a Principal Software Developer to join the team.  If you are passionate about creating innovate customer solutions, have significant coding experience and have worked in an environment requiring attention to detail and fast solution turn around you are the person we are looking for. 

The role will involve developing enterprise web applications taking advantage of open source Java technologies. As well as developing new products, the successful candidate will also create new and exciting features for our core products in the telecommunication and online payment sectors. You’ll be involved in all stages of the development process, from analysis and design to implementation and testing. Working in an agile environment, the successful candidate requires the ability to both work in a team and individually.   

Primary Role 

At Lifecycle the Development Team are responsible for delivering high quality solutions to our wide range of customers and responding to Change Request applications.  

You will work as a senior leader in a multidisciplinary team to ensure close alignment to the technical strategy and development standards that you will also help shape and embed. You will be passionate about working on complex puzzles to benefit the smooth running the business. You are invested in developing the capability of colleagues around you, helping to shape career paths and working generously to share your own expertise and learning. You enjoy working closely with customers, learning of their needs, and translating these to features. You are confident operating to agile principles and will thrive on collaborating with technical minds across Software Engineering, as well as other teams. You will strive to remain close to the detail on emerging technologies, identifying, testing and championing their adoption where appropriate. 

Key Accountabilities: 

Setting Technical Direction: Establish a clear technical vision for the company or team, aligning it with the overall business strategy. This includes defining technology standards, tools, and practices, and ensuring they are up-to-date with industry trends. The goal is to create a roadmap that guides all technical decisions and development efforts. 

Identifying Technology Strategic Growth Opportunities: Looking for new technologies, methodologies, or market trends that can be leveraged to enhance the company's product offerings or operational efficiency. This involves staying informed about emerging technologies and assessing their potential impact on the business. 

Communicating Multi-Year Technical Strategy: Articulating a long-term vision for the company's technology development, including milestones and objectives. This requires effective communication skills to ensure that all stakeholders, from team members to upper management, understand and are aligned with the strategy. 

Providing Training/Mentoring to Other Engineers: Foster the growth and development of fellow engineers through knowledge sharing, coaching, and offering constructive feedback. Including formal training sessions, one-on-one mentoring, or creating educational materials. 

Designing, Coding, and Debugging Software: This covers the entire software development lifecycle, from conceptualizing and creating new software applications to identifying and fixing bugs in existing software. 

Improving Performance of Existing Software: Optimizing code, enhancing features, and ensuring the software remains efficient and effective. It requires regular review and updates to maintain high performance standards. 

Maintaining and Upgrading Existing Software: Regular updates and maintenance of software applications to ensure they remain secure, efficient, and relevant. Involving patching security vulnerabilities, updating features, or adapting software to new hardware or operating systems. 

Recommending New Technologies to Increase Productivity: Stay abreast of the latest technological advancements and recommending tools, frameworks, or practices that can enhance team productivity and product quality. 

Supervising and Overseeing Technical Aspects of Projects: Manage the technical elements of a project, from initial design to final implementation, ensuring that all technical requirements are met and align with the project's goals. 

Sharing Knowledge through Presentations: Share expertise and insights with the team or the wider organization through presentations, which helps in spreading knowledge and encouraging a learning culture within the organization. 

Encoding Knowledge in Libraries and Tools for Wider Use: Create reusable code libraries or tools that can be utilized across the company or shared with the broader software community. Involving identifying common challenges and developing solutions that can be widely adopted. 

Being Data-Driven: Use data analytics to make informed decision-making processes. This involves gathering and analysing data to understand trends, measure performance, and identify opportunities for improvement or innovation. 

Required employee skills and attributes 

The employee will have: 

Essential 

• Java or Kotlin (JVM 11+) 

• Spring Framework - Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring Libraries including JDBC, R2DBC, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, Caching 

• Web Technologies (at least one of) - Spring MVC, JSF (IceFaces), Struts, Wicket  

• Hibernate or other ORM 

• Build Tools - Maven, GitHub Actions 

• JavaScript Frameworks (at least one of) – React, Angular (8+)  

• SQL Database technologies (at least one of) - SQL Server, PostgreSQL 

• No SQL Databases (at least one of) – Redis, MongoDB, Elasticsearch 

• Message Brokers – RabbitMQ 

• Microservice Architecture - Docker Deployments, Kubernetes, Helm Deployments 

• Working with Git source control 

Desirable: 

• Telecoms billing processes and/or systems 

• Online Charging Systems - Diameter protocol, Radius protocol 

• CRM processes/systems 

• Linux Operating Systems 

• Web Services: SOAP and Rest 

• IT networking 

• CI/CD 

• The Atlassian Suite (JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket, Bamboo) 

• Azure Services 

• Machine learning algorithms 

• Big Data (Hadoop, Azure Data Lake, S3, Apache Spark) 

• Additional programming languages – Python, Scala, Typescript, CSS 3/SASS (or other pre-processors)  

Other Information 

The successful candidate will be rewarded with competitive salary, and technically challenging, cutting edge projects. It is important that the successful candidate has a passion for learning new technologies. 

The vacancy is a hybrid-remote role and the successful candidate will be a self-starter who is willing to work autonomously. Relocation candidates considered.