Development Lead

The Development Lead (Dev Lead) plays a pivotal role in ensuring the technical direction, quality, and delivery of software solutions aligned with business needs. This role combines hands-on development with leadership and mentoring responsibilities. The Dev Lead collaborates closely with Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Delivery Managers, QA, and DevOps to drive high-quality, secure, and performant code. They uphold engineering standards, support team capability growth, and ensure sustainable delivery practices.

Key Responsibilities:

Provide technical leadership to a team of developers, setting direction and standards for implementation.

Actively contribute to the codebase, building new features, services, and integrations in alignment with team objectives.

Guide the team in applying modern engineering practices including TDD, CI/CD, and code quality gates.

Promote ownership and accountability within the team, ensuring delivery of maintainable, secure, and performant solutions.

Balance hands-on technical work with coaching and support of team members to build their confidence, autonomy, and capability.

Define and uphold development standards and patterns.

Lead by example with high-quality code contributions and peer reviews.

Collaborate on architectural decisions, ensuring alignment with enterprise patterns and maintainability.

Maintain technical documentation and support knowledge sharing across the team.

Own and contribute to technical planning, estimates, and feasibility assessments.

Break down features into actionable stories and tasks in collaboration with the Scrum team.

Participate in sprint planning and backlog refinement with a technical perspective.

Mentor developers across experience levels through code reviews, pair programming, and 1:1 coaching.

Contribute to recruitment, onboarding, and growth of engineering talent.

Provide informal feedback and support performance development in alignment with SFIA and internal frameworks.

Ensure robust unit testing, CI/CD integration, and alignment with QA practices.

Foster a culture of continuous improvement, technical excellence, and Agile delivery.

Participate in incident reviews and post-mortems to inform quality improvements.

Collaborate closely with the Scrum team to deliver working software in short iterations.

Actively engage in Agile ceremonies, supporting high-performance team behaviours.

Work with stakeholders to clarify requirements, refine stories, and align on priorities.

Champion secure development practices and support compliance with policies.

Identify and address technical risks early in the development lifecycle.

Collaborate with InfoSec and QA to ensure product and platform security standards are upheld.

Essential Skills & Experience:

Proven experience developing with Python.

Proficient in full-stack development and relevant frameworks/tools.

SQL experience, with PostgreSQL and/or MySQL.

Experience with implementing RESTful APIs and UI development.

Strong understanding of software architecture, systems design, and integration.

Experienced in mentoring and developing software engineers.

Skilled in driving adoption of coding standards and Agile engineering practices.

Familiar with Agile methodologies and continuous delivery pipelines.

Advocates for automation, monitoring, and metrics-driven development.

Desirable Skills & Experience:

Experience with cloud-native application development (AWS/Azure/GCP).

Knowledge of containerisation and infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Docker, Terraform).

Exposure to architectural frameworks and design reviews.

About Us

Gigaclear is a leading alternative operator of rural full fibre broadband networks in the UK. Offering customers a truly world class product, we are developing our fibre-to-the-premises broadband (FTTP / FTTH) infrastructure to some of the most difficult to reach areas of the UK, empowering those communities with broadband to rival any city.

Staff rewards, benefits and opportunities

We foster a collaborative, engaging culture that empowers staff to grow and maximise their skills. We want to challenge our people in a fair environment where hard work is rewarded and a path for progression is open to all.

Generous employer pension; up to 8% matched contribution 

Income protection & life assurance 

25 days holiday (plus bank holidays), holiday purchase scheme and Yay Days!  

Health cash plan, 24/7 remote GP access and Employee Assistance Programme including counselling & legal advice 

Unlimited access to online training and development content via our Learning Management System 

Long service benefits and monthly employee recognition 

Enhanced maternity and paternity provisions 

Flexible working environment 

Health & Wellbeing initiatives and company funded social events 

Our values

Our approach is to work guided by our mission, vision and values.

Find a way, Be committed, Do the right thing, Keep it simple