Director of Technology

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Director of Technology

Department: Technology Team

Reporting to: Chief Product Officer

Type of Contract: Permanent

Working Pattern: Full time

Location: London, Camden.  This is not a remote working position, and you must have the right to work in the UK

 ABOUT THE ROLE

The Director of Technology is responsible for FutureLearn's technology leadership, direction, architecture and strategy. They are the face of technology at FutureLearn and are responsible for inspiring technologists and creating a motivating environment for them to do their best work.

This role reports to the Chief Product Officer and together with the Director of Product and Director of Experience forms the Product Leadership team; responsible for nurturing the creative and collaborative environment for cross functional teams to develop the FutureLearn platform. The Director of Technology line manages a team of over thirty and is supported by the Head of Engineering who is responsible for managing the engineering team and developing people and processes.

The Director of Technology is responsible for ensuring that our technology scales to meet the growing needs of our business. They make sure that we can change things quickly, the cost of change is low and the quality of code is high, and features are robust and well-tested, and considerate of performance, accessibility and maintainability.

They make sure that we are avoiding knowledge silos and single points of failure.  You will promote the opportunities that technology offers us and also highlight how it may impact on the decisions we make to the product team, executive team and the wider organisation. The Director of Technology has an in-depth knowledge of the technology demands of FutureLearn and can help the Technology team understand other non-technical perspectives.

You are also responsible for championing technology best practice across the whole company in key areas such as security and explaining why we are taking particular technology approaches or making specific choices so that it is clear to everyone in the organisation what the benefits are.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Represent technology and lead the technology team

Represent technology in product leadership team and lead the collaboration with other disciplines

Line manage and support the Head of Engineering to coach and develop the Technology team to make sure that we can deliver our technical strategy

Create a motivating environment where technologists feel responsible, involved and listened to and encourage a culture of maintainability and scalability

Makes sure everyone in technology understands their missions and objectives, the reasons and consequences of architecture and infrastructural decisions, highlights the opportunities and problems and explain the reasons why we might do things in simple terms that make sense to all

Where required represent the technology team and engineering decisions to the executive team, board and partners

Raise the profile of FutureLearn as an employer in the technology industry and continue to build FutureLearn's reputation as a great place for technologists to work

Set the technical direction and architecture

Understand the needs and goals of the business and how technology plays a role in meeting them, and explore and champion technical solutions that can help us deliver our strategy more effectively and efficiently

Champion a bold & ambitious approach to technology, set technical strategy, plan delivery of large technical changes and make sure they are communicated, bought into and well understood beyond technology

Work with Technical Architects, Technical Leads, Lead Data Engineer and Site Reliability Engineer to deliver the technical strategy, decide architecture and establish technical best practice across the product teams

Ensure that we're able to maintain a fast pace of delivery in a sustainable way

Coordinate technical work across all product teams and ensure consistent, sustainable, valuable investment in technology

Ensure that the most sensible technology, tools and techniques are being used

Ensures that all technologists feel well-informed about the technical direction and any changes taking place

Ensure that FutureLearn.com is stable, secure and scalable

Ensure that FutureLearn is GDPR compliant, protects user privacy and ensure we are taking a best practice approach to other legal & compliance-related aspects of our technology

Manage technical debt and work with product management to organise when & how to repay it

Ensure that plans are in place for technical support, incident response, disaster recovery, regular penetration testing etc, and that those plans are regularly revised and tested to confirm their validity

REQUIREMENTS

We're looking for a proven technical leader with the following:

A proven track record of delivering well-engineered products within a product culture where customers are at the heart of decision making

Experience leading multi-disciplinary teams in a fast-paced startup/scaleup environment, with a strong track record of delivery

Familiarity with Ruby on Rails and React or comparable technologies

Experience in leadership positions on multiple larger (i.e. many person-years of development) agile web development projects

Experience of representing technology to senior non technical stakeholders to increase their understanding and influence their behaviour

Extensive knowledge of a range of current cross-platform product development frameworks and infrastructure

Experience of any of the following is a bonus:

Line management of technology teams

Working for a growth business, with associated technical challenges e.g. breaking up monolithic applications into a more modular architecture

Managing operations, cloud architecture and AWS

Working in a continuous delivery environment

Developing native (iOS and/or Android) applications

Experience of leading teams through significant periods of growth and/or change

Working for education technology or marketplace business

You should also be:

Passionate: You care about FutureLearn's purpose to transform access to education

Inspirational: You can command the respect of other technologists and are an inspiring individual that makes technologists want to work at FutureLearn

Collaborative: You enjoy working as part of a cross functional team

Great communicator: You can build strong, effective relationships with people from different disciplines and help them understand the impact of technology decisions

Proactive and flexible: you enjoy working in fast-changing, high-paced environments with high levels of complexity and ambiguity to deliver outcomes

 ABOUT FUTURELEARN

 FutureLearn is transforming access to education and is one of the world's largest social learning platforms.

Based in London's Camden Town, we offer online courses, programs and degrees run by over 100 leading universities from around the world including UCL, University of California Berkeley, University of Edinburgh, University of Melbourne, King's College London, Purdue University and University of Groningen. We also offer online courses from specialist education providers including CIPD, UNESCO and the Raspberry PI foundation.

Our purpose is to transform access to education. Our award-winning platform helps by provoking conversation around the course material, so that learners and educators learn as much from each other as from the material itself.

Since our launch in September 2013, we've run hundreds of courses that have attracted over 10 million learners from all over the world and we've seen over 19 million enrolments on our open online courses and are now working with our partners to pioneer a more modular and accessible approach to studying full degrees.

 BENEFITS

Competitive compensation package

28 days holiday (plus 8 days public holiday)

Buy & sell up to 5 days holiday

Charity day (volunteer for a charity of your choice)

Cycle to work scheme

Season Ticket loan

Flexible working environment/hours

Pension (4% employer / employee contribution)

OU Staff Fee Course Waiver Programme

Great coffee, teas, fruit and daily breakfast

Perkbox

 RECRUITMENT PROCESS

Please contact Click here to contact this recruiter if you require any reasonable adjustments or alterations to be made, to support you through the recruitment process.

APPLICATIONS

Please submit a CV and a cover letter explaining why you would like to work for FutureLearn and how your skills and experience meet the requirements outlined above (300 word maximum).  Please also include information on your current remuneration package.

FutureLearn is an equal opportunities organisation who value diversity, promote equality and challenge discrimination. We are especially keen to encourage applications from people currently under-represented, including those from the LGBT+ community, neurodiverse people, people with disabilities, and those from a Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic background.

The closing date for this position is Monday 18th November.

DIVERSITY STATEMENT

We value diversity at FutureLearn, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, neurodiversity, marital or disability status.