Engineering Lead

Functional area: Technology
Reports to: CEO
Direct reports: Technical development team
Location: Home office and occasional office visits (Greater London area)
Expected Start: ASAP

About Us

Urban Data Collective delivers solutions to facilitate the sharing and reuse of live data generated from an increasing number of sensors and smart infrastructure deployed across cities and urban spaces. Our mission is to democratise access to such data so that organisations and communities can create better urban futures.

Our main product is the Urban Data Exchange (UDX) platform that enables data owners to share real-time data from different systems in an easy and trusted way as open or commercial data, while at the same time enabling data users to find and access the live data streams they need. On top of UDX we also deliver insight services, to help users make sense of live data so they can take more informed decisions and actions, accelerating their journey to Net Zero and helping them become more sustainable and resilient.

As a company, we are backed by the Digital Catapult and have recently closed a successful seed funding round. Based remotely with occasional team get-togethers in the Greater London Area, this role offers an exciting opportunity to be a key part of a start-up engineering team in its early days, delivering a market defining SaaS platform to power the urban data economy.

About the Role

You will contribute to the ongoing product vision and service offerings towards the market and will be responsible for translating these into the technical product roadmap and oversee its successful delivery and further scaling.

As the engineering lead, you will be responsible for the software development and hosting infrastructure and the delivery processes that go with it. We already have an established minimum viable product (MVP) with several paying customers and a solid basis for the software development and delivery infrastructure which you will enhance and scale.

You will also develop the engineering culture and grow a team of talented technical staff, according to company hiring plans, that is able to further sustain product development and operational support towards customers. You will be aware of the latest technology trends and select the most suitable ones to make the product more competitive.

In the near future, you will have to be very hands on and lead on solution architecting, software development, testing and DevOps engineering, and collaborate with other partners and clients on MVP enhancements and product market fit explorations.

As the product becomes more mature and with a growing team you will take on team management responsibilities and support the longer-term product roadmap through suitable R&D exploration to enable these.

Ideally you will have hands-on experience with most of the technologies in our stack. We don’t expect you to have worked with them all, but we do need you to be motivated and curious to quickly upskill:

• REACT for our public web interfaces

• Graphql for our private API gateway

• NodeJS for our public API and application code

• Postgres databases

• Kafka for our data pipelines and asynchronous message streams

• Docker for containerising our microservices

• AWS for most of our infrastructure

• Terraform for all our infrastructure as code

In addition, you should have awareness of the latest software development and technology trends and highlight those that could make the team more efficient and the product more competitive. Good communication is really important to us, and you should be able to clearly articulate technical concepts to a variety of different audiences including colleagues, partners, clients and stakeholders.

This role will provide ample exposure opportunities to non-technical aspects of the business and the ability to influence both company and product vision.

At Urban Data Collective, you can make a real difference to cities and communities by empowering others to innovate and make better decisions enabled by our products.

Required Skills & Expertise

What you’ll do	What we’re looking for
Take on the lead and responsibility for the company’s technical product roadmap and its implementation.	Solid track record in the development and delivery of cloud-based software products Experience in development of product strategy and technical product roadmaps Creative thinking and passion for problem solving
Stay on top of latest technology developments and ensure that you utilise these to our competitive advantage	Good understanding of IoT technology demonstrated through previous roles Strong software engineering fundamentals and holistic knowledge of modern cloud and web stacks beyond a single technology and vendor ecosystem Passion to learn about new emerging technologies
Manage appropriate technical environments and tools for software design, development, continuous integration, hosting and end user documentation	Experience in managing industry grade software production pipelines supporting continuous integration and delivery. Experience in being part of the full product life cycle and operating devops pipelines for cloud based software
Develop the engineering culture in the company and build a high performing engineering team in line with the companies hiring plans	Previous development team leadership experience Experience in hiring and building successful software engineering teams
Contribute actively to product development, code reviews of other team members, performance optimisation and maintenance.	Significant hands-on development experience in industry grade production software as part of a team Experience in mentoring less experienced members of a software development team
Work closely with partners and customers to drive an MVP to product market fit.	Confident communicator, good listener with people centric approach, able to switch seamlessly between problem and solution space Effectively building formal and informal relationships inside and outside the organization
Act as a technical evangelist to inspire early adopters of our product and peer technologists in the industry to join our cause	Confident communicator with a creative attitude, with evidence of presenting innovation projects. Track record in sharing technical works and thought leadership as part of blogs, social media, articles, meetup and industry events.
Support the creation of technical tender responses and new funding bids	Experience in putting together and winning R&D funding proposals and commercial tenders as part of a team spanning different organisations

Apply Now

Please send a copy of your CV and covering letter to: careers@urbandatacollective.com

No recruiters please.