William Reed Ltd
Specialist Software Engineer
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Specialist Software Engineer
Department: Digital Development
Location: Gatwick
Description
William Reed is investing in the Piano Marketing Product Suite, spanning Piano Composer, Piano Analytics, and Piano Audience, to support personalisation, experimentation, audience segmentation, and performance insight across a growing number of specialist digital brands.
This role sits within the Specialist Software Engineering team, with a focus on implementation, integration, engineering, and support of the Piano Product Suite across the digital estate covering multiple CMS platforms.
The role requires a blend of strong front-end development capability, sound engineering judgement, and the ability to work with audience logic, segmentation, and event-driven data structures.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Building, configuring, and maintaining Piano Composer experiences, experiments, and journeys to support engagement, conversion, and commercial performance.
- Translating business and product requirements into technically sound solutions within Piano Composer, including segmentation logic, composer flows, activation rules, and testing approaches.
- Writing and maintaining JavaScript for front-end behaviours and components, including pop-ups, form enhancements, DOM manipulation, event listeners, error handling, and custom interaction logic.
- Debugging HTML, CSS, and JavaScript issues across multiple CMS platforms to ensure experiences are stable, performant, and maintainable.
- Supporting the rollout of Piano Analytics across multiple platforms, including instrumentation planning, event architecture, and technical validation.
- Designing, implementing, and maintaining event-based data layer structures to ensure reliable tracking, segmentation, activation, and reporting.
- Configuring, testing, and validating both client-side and server-side Google Tag Manager containers to ensure data is captured, transformed, and passed correctly into Piano Analytics.
- Investigating tagging, tracking, and registration journey issues, including the use of event listeners and debugging techniques to identify failures and improve data quality.
- Reviewing Piano Analytics data to identify optimisation opportunities, implementation gaps, and areas where the user journey or measurement design can be improved.
- Driving effective integration between Piano Composer, Piano Analytics, and Piano Audience to strengthen activation, behavioural insight, and audience intelligence.
- Managing code and release activity through a controlled Git and Bitbucket workflow, with appropriate testing, version control, and deployment discipline across pre-production and production environments.
- Using Jira, Tempo, and Confluence to manage incoming work, document technical decisions, and maintain clear implementation documentation.
- Acting as an escalation point for complex issues related to tracking, tagging, experimentation, audience configuration, and front-end behaviour.
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What You’ll Need
Essential
- Strong experience with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, including front-end debugging and practical experience building interactive web components and behaviours.
- Strong experience writing JavaScript for DOM manipulation, event tracking, form behaviour, custom functionality, and client-side troubleshooting.
- Experience working with experimentation, personalisation, or activation platforms such as Piano Composer, Adobe Target, Optimizely, or similar.
- Experience with analytics implementations, tracking validation, and behavioural data used to inform product or commercial decisions.
- Experience designing or working with data layers, event schemas, and tag management approaches.
- Understanding of A/B testing, multivariate testing, statistical confidence, and experiment design principles.
- Working knowledge of APIs, JSON, and modern web architecture.
- Experience using Git-based version control, ideally within Bitbucket, including branching, pull requests, and controlled release processes.
- Familiarity with Jira and Confluence for delivery tracking and documentation.
Highly Desirable
- Hands-on experience with Piano Composer, Piano Analytics, and Piano Audience.
- Experience implementing analytics across more than one CMS platform.
- Experience configuring Google Tag Manager in both client-side and server-side environments.
- Experience diagnosing registration, subscription, or conversion funnel issues using front-end event handling and tracking validation.
- Ability to transfer best practice from similar platforms into a growing Piano estate.
Analytical and Delivery Profile
- Able to interpret behavioural and performance data to form hypotheses, define success criteria, and support structured experimentation.
- Comfortable validating tracking, investigating anomalies, and measuring outcomes through analytics platforms.
- Able to balance engineering quality, business priorities, and delivery speed across multiple concurrent requests.
- Capable of explaining technical implementation choices clearly to product, editorial, commercial, and other non-technical stakeholders.
- Proactive in identifying implementation improvements, challenging unclear requirements, and raising technical risks early.
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Role Positioning
This is a specialist engineering role focused on implementing, integrating, and extending the Piano suite across William Reed digital platforms.
Although the products support marketing outcomes, the role is not positioned within the digital marketing team. Its core purpose is to provide technical ownership, front-end engineering capability, analytics implementation support, and integration expertise within the Specialist Software Engineer team.
Benefits & Initiatives
- 6.6 weeks of annual leave (pro-rata for part-time). The equivalent to 25 days plus standard England and Wales bank holidays for full-time colleagues.
- One additional day holiday per year after 6 years’ service, up to a maximum 7.6 weeks of annual leave (pro-rata for part-time). The equivalent to 30 days plus standard England and Wales bank holidays for full-time colleagues.
- A holiday purchase scheme, allowing employees to purchase up to 3 additional days of annual leave and spread the cost over up to 6 months.
- An additional day of paid leave, a ‘MeDay’, allowing you the flexibility to celebrate a cultural or religious event or your birthday. It recognises that everyone’s background is unique and gives you the freedom to mark what matters to you.
- One paid volunteering day per year to support a charity or community initiative of your choice.
- Hybrid and agile working opportunities (role dependent).
- Enhanced Pension Contributions, we offer employer pension contributions above the statutory minimum.
- Life Assurance Scheme.
- Group Income Protection.
- Enhanced family-friendly leave pay entitlements.
- Wellbeing benefits, including: A health care cash plan, Employee Assistance Programme, Virtual GP service, and access to health & wellbeing resources and tools.
- Equity, Diversity & Inclusion initiatives, supported by employee-led networks and proud to be a Disability Confident Committed employer.
- Cycle to Work Scheme (subject to satisfactory completion of probationary period).
- Electric Car Scheme (subject to satisfactory completion of probationary period).
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