**Job Description**

  
Talis is a fast growing yet small and agile business, emerging from the start-
up phase, with big plans for game-changing software in Education. We are
funded by an established technology and services group and provided with the
support and space to determine our own destiny.

  
Launched three years ago, our education enterprise application platform, Talis
Aspire, has now been adopted by 50 Universities in the UK and Australia. We
are expanding, both into new markets and with new modules. With successful
validation of our approach, our plans for the next phase include building out
further modules in both the enterprise and direct to end user spaces.

  
We have a need for an experienced technical lead who will work exclusively on
the enterprise side of our business, on our web and mobile applications.

  
**Skills & Requirements**  

  * Your job is to work in partnership with the product manager and the development team to ensure new features - and new products - delight customers, ship on time, and are of a high quality.
  * This role is a long term commitment to lead, be responsible and accountable for the technical aspects of our enterprise products. As such there is significant scope for career growth as we expand our reach and product set.
  * You'll have prior experience as a technical lead of a significant product or service.
  * It's great to hear about your experience on green field development, but you'll also need to demonstrate experience working on products that have been in the market for some time and have gone through multiple iterations. You'll enjoy scaling and building for hundreds of thousands of users just as much as shipping a shiny new product to hundreds.
  * You'll be courageous in your approach to technology and not be afraid to undertake major changes if that is what is required to get the job done.
  * You'll share our appetite for unit testing, automated testing and continuous integration. You'll likely have opinions on how to improve our approach to all three.
  * Our applications are in it for the long haul. Over their active life they'll be worked on by many people from many backgrounds, and you'll accept they won't always see things as you see them. Your approach will reflect that - your code will be self-documenting, exhibit sensible and recognisable patterns, and your designs will be capable of being easily refactored as we scale, grow and further develop our products. Crucially, you'll mentor others to do the same.
  * An eye for architecting for today's actual functional requirements and scale, with an eye on how to evolve things only when tomorrow's requirements come to the fore. As a result, you'll be expert at refactoring when tomorrow comes. We've mentioned refactoring twice now.
  * It's important you are not allergic to users. You will occasionally interact directly with them whilst supporting the product manager, and you should enjoy that.
  * We don't have to do all the work. You'll have a good feel for the important things to do yourself, and what work we should be asking partners, associates or other 3rd party experts to do on our behalf.
  * Everyone is encouraged to ask a lot of questions here, so you should be ready for people to challenge and feedback on your approach and ideas, and vice versa.
  * We are a fun, small, smart and close knit team. Every individual is expected to make a real and tangible difference to our success. We're open and transparent, and those that share in our values thrive and stay with us for many years.
  * We are a start-up now in the scale up phase, so those looking for a more corporate environment need not apply.
  
**About our stack**  

  * Our products were originally built exclusively in PHP, but increasingly we are moving to a heterogeneous service oriented architecture with services implemented with node.js, ruby and other technologies. The emphasis is on the right tool for the job, rather than worship at any particular technology altar.
  * We make extensive use of NoSQL technology. Our core data platform is currently MongoDB.
  * We like to crunch numbers, log files and whatever else we can get our hands on in Hadoop.
  * We use a hybrid of cloud and co-located services.
  * We track, time and monitor everything that moves. Currently we're using a combination of Sensu, PagerDuty, Dashing, NewRelic, Graphite.
  * It is only desirable, not essential, that you have experience in some or all of the technologies we use today. They'll not be the exact same set we use in 18 months time - perhaps you'll introduce some better ones? The important thing is that you can demonstrate you are a quick learner, use and select technologies on their own merit, and can apply sound theory in your decisions and code.
  
**About Talis Group Limited**  
  
This role reports to the CTO, but you'll be part of, and accountable to, a
wider management group which includes sales, marketing, product and customer
services.

  
Although our offices are based in central Birmingham, all of our roles allow a
degree of home working depending on specific requirements as set by your peers
and reports.

  
In addition to an attractive salary, we offer an exceptionally generous
contributory pension scheme, private medical insurance (after induction
period) and immediate cover on an exceptional Health Cash Plan, including
dental and optical cover.

  
We are an employee owned business and there is an opportunity to share in
equity in the medium to long term.



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