Software Engineering Manager - PHP

JOB TITLE: Software Development Manager

JOB TYPE: Full time

DIVISION: Pearson Assessment Services

LOCATION: Rotherham, Manchester, or London

About Pearson: Our purpose at Pearson is to help everyone achieve their potential through learning. At the heart of this is a commitment to sustainable practices and meaningful, measurable outcomes. We are the world’s leading learning company. Our ability to help people learn is built on our ability to grow with and adapt to a constantly evolving market.

About Pearson Assessment Services: The Pearson Assessment Services (PAS) team provides assessment services to the UK and international assessment markets, supporting government education departments with project management, operational delivery and technical solutions.

About the job: The position is for a Development Manager to recruit and lead a PHP Laravel team working on large scale assessment delivery application-based systems in AWS. The successful candidate will manage their own team of PHP Laravel developers located in multiple locations.

About you: We expect you to have significant experience as a full-stack developer. You’ll have strong leadership and management skills with experience of managing agile delivery teams that develop solutions at pace to provide real end user benefits. You will be a champion of Agile project delivery.

Key Skills & Experience

1. Strong skills in PHP Laravel

2. Gathering, evaluating, and prioritizing requests for product changes, enhancements, and new features

3. Evaluating recent technologies that may be incorporated into future releases of the product.

4. Participating in all product activities related to release and iteration planning, to ensure that the team has a clear understanding of the goals and can complete development on schedule.

5. Tracking product roadmap and project issues to completion

6. Providing technical guidance to the development team

7. Working with senior leadership team to execute long term technology strategy

8. Ensuring that the development team successfully delivers applications to production and provides post deployment support as required

9. Applying best practices for chosen development platform

10. Understand modern application architectures and how they can be applied, like Microservice / Service Oriented Architectures

11. Ensuring that overall software architecture guidance in terms of best practice is followed by the team

12. Recruitment of developers

13. Managing training requirements for teams to ensure skills are kept up in line with Pearson’s technology strategy

14. Mentor and coach team members to help them reach their full potential and advance their careers.

15. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to drive product development and delivery.

16. Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to manage complex projects.

17. Excellent communication skills and the ability to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams.

18. Ability to manage multiple projects during the same time effectively, and efficiently.

19. Ability to identify and document business processes and requirements.

Desirable Skills & Experience

1. PHP Laravel

2. Docker and containers

3. Designing, developing, and deploying cloud applications

4. Terraform

5. Experience partnering with program management teams.

6. Strong Agile Scrum project management experience

7. 5+ years of experience managing engineering teams.

8. Experience managing multiple projects simultaneously.

9. Applying development methodologies like TDD, CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code

Pearson’s Benefits:

1. 25 Days annual leave (increasing by 1 day with every year of continuous service up to 30 days); annual leave trading, +/- 5 days.

2. Annual Bonus

3. Private Pension plan scheme where we pay in double what you contribute, up to 16% depending on your age.

4. Life, private medical and dental care insurance options, plus free eye tests

5. Stock/share purchase options

6. Maternity, paternity, and family care leave as well as flexible working policies.

7. An employee wellbeing assistance programme

8. Cycle to work program, volunteering days, gym membership concessions in selected office locations, along with retail and leisure discounts.

Location: The role is aligned to our Manchester, Rotherham, or London offices. Our Rotherham office is located at Junction 1 of the M18. All our roles are hybrid working; our current policy requires our team to visit their base office no more than once a week, with the possibility of occasional business travel to other Pearson sites.

Diversity: At Pearson we value the power of an inclusive culture and a strong sense of belonging. We promote a culture where differences are embraced as strengths and opportunities are equal and accessible.

How to apply: Thank you for your interest in applying for a role at Pearson. Please submit an updated CV and cover letter (optional) in English. If you have any additional questions or require further information, please do not hesitate to reach out to us.

We look forward to receiving your application - Talent Acquisition Team