Clearswift are looking to hire Team Leaders to work in our R&D team based in our Reading office. The role is 70% hands on development so you will need to be a talented developer (either Java or C++). The other 30% will be the day to day running of your team, mentoring and developing their skills as well as carrying out appraisals. Our teams are usually around six or seven people strong, ranging from Senior Developer through to Associates.
Why work at Clearswift?
We are passionate about delivering innovative and quality solutions to real customer problems. We work with a wide range of customers including some of the world’s largest government departments, large defence organisations and well known financial and legal organisations.
We strive to hire positive and energetic people who want to make a difference to our products. We promote autonomy and ownership to enable people and teams to make their own collaborative decisions and to choose the best way to tackle challenges. We encourage an environment of continuous improvement in practices and self-development.
Our stack
We are a Java house, with C++ being the second most used language. We also use Python, C# and Ruby for smaller projects. We use Subversion and GitHub (with less of the former and more of the latter every day). We use Swagger/OpenAPI to define our RESTful API’s and implement them using Spring Boot. We build and deploy using Gradle, Jenkins and Nexus. Static analysis is done using SonarQube and Coverty, Unit Testing is covered with JUnit and Mockito. We test them BDD style using Cucumber.
Our UI is created in JSP, with some GWT, but we are currently evaluating a move to using Angular, React or Vue.
Our products are built on RedHat Enterprise Linux.
We have a strategy aimed at optimising the variety of technologies that we use, maximising the use of open source solutions such as Postfix, PostgreSQL, Apache Traffic Server and ActiveMQ, while actively contributing back to the community. We are big fans of continuous integration and continuous deployment & use Jenkins, Chef and GitHub to help us with that.
How we work
We use Scrum and Kanban, with a few techniques borrowed from Less. This allows us to create flexibility and variety of work for everyone on the team. Our sprints last two weeks and finish with a demo or mini talk about what we achieved. We constantly optimise our processes to enable the team to focus on what they do best – solving real customer problems using code.
Every member of the team is given, and proactively encouraged to use, ten innovation days per year to learn about, or work on, anything they want that is related to their career. Our team use these days to achieve a wide range of things, from fixing bugs in product and development environments, learning new skills and technologies or coming up with truly innovative ideas and prototypes that later become part of our products.
Technical lunches take place regularly and feature an abundance of ideas and knowledge sharing, along with tons of pizza!
