About The Team

The SciVal Development Team is a cross-functional group comprising Frontend, Backend, and Quality Engineers who work closely together. The team collaborates closely with UX and Product to design, build, and deliver high-quality features efficiently and reliably.

SciVal is a data-driven product that provides academic and research metrics to customers, enabling insight, analysis, and informed decision-making. The team focuses on building scalable, reliable solutions while continuously improving usability, performance, and data accuracy.

About The Role

Acts as the technical lead and facilitator for a cross-functional squad. In addition to hands-on design, coding, and/or test automation, this role sets technical direction, shapes delivery plans, drives quality strategy, and unblocks the team through facilitation—not line management. Partners closely with Product, Architecture, QE, SRE/Platform, and adjacent squads to deliver reliable, secure, and observable software.

This role is expected to provide broad technical leadership across all disciplines in the squad, including backend, frontend, quality engineering, and platform concerns, while bringing deeper specialisation in Big Data engineering. The successful candidate should be able to drive and facilitate discussions on FE issues, QE strategy, delivery risks, and operational concerns, while contributing strong expertise in areas such as Databricks/EMR, OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, and graph databases such as Neo4j.

Key responsibilities

• Serve as the first line of technical escalation for the squad’s services/components.
• Facilitate team ceremonies (refinement, technical grooming, sprint planning, design reviews) with a focus on flow and outcomes.
• Translate product objectives into sound technical designs and testable acceptance criteria; decompose epics into implementable stories.
• Design and implement complex features; complete complex bug fixes and performance improvements.
• Provide technical leadership across backend, frontend, QE, and platform concerns, ensuring balanced decisions across disciplines.
• Bring depth in Big Data / Backend engineering, helping shape solutions involving distributed data processing, search/indexing platforms, and graph/data-intensive systems.
• Drive technical discussions on FE issues, QE issues, architecture trade-offs, delivery risks, and non-functional requirements, even where implementation is led by other specialists in the squad.
• Define and uphold the Definition of Ready/Done, including code quality, automated test coverage, security checks, and observability.
• Establish/maintain CI/CD pipelines, quality gates, and sensible branching/release strategies.
• Drive a pragmatic quality strategy: test pyramid balance, contract tests, data management, environments, and non-functional testing.
• Partner with TIO on SLOs, alerting, runbooks, incident response, and post-incident learning.
• Mentor through pairing, code/test reviews, and architecture discussions (no performance management duties).
• Document designs and decisions (e.g., ADRs), and keep technical docs and runbooks current.
• Coordinate dependencies and integration with other squads and external partners; surface risks with clear options/trade-offs.
• Track and improve key delivery/quality indicators (lead time, change fail rate, MTTR, escaped defects, performance budgets).