Dr Challoner's Grammar School - Dev/Ops Manager

Amersham  ‐ Remote
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Keywords

Description

Get paid to make a difference and keep learning

At DCGS we pride ourselves on ensuring our students have access to the very best in technology to enhance their learning and to ensure that they are full equipped for their future digital life.

Our innovative approach means that our technological environment is not that of a typical academy. We fully manage our own services, API’s and infrastructure through a small, dedicated and innovative IT team and aim to open-source the majority of our internally developed code this year.

The pace of change in technology in the classroom driven by the increasing demands of users means that we need to continually expand our ability to respond and plan in this area – and that is where you come in.

Acting in a senior role in our Technology Support team your work will have a direct impact on the teaching and learning of over 1300 students each year.

The school currently operates across several popular technology stacks, and it is likely that we will explore alternatives during your tenure as we respond to new opportunities to enhance our students’ experiences. Absolutely vital to this role will be your passion, enthusiasm and willingness to adapt and continue to learn.

During your time here you will gain a high-level understanding of our entire IT system, together with how it interacts with the rest of the school. You will also have the opportunity to own and drive improvement projects from scoping, through implementation and onto impact review. Plus you’ll be ensuring that applications and services that we implement & commission continue to operate seamlessly once installed.

Whilst we love the fresh air & tree filled views, we recognise that our location outside the centre of London (but still on the tube!) might not suit everyone. We’re therefore happy to negotiate some flexibility and remote working into the role for the right candidate, so feel free to chat to us about this.

A typical day

The most exciting aspect of this role is that a typical day simply does not exist. The breadth of technologies and projects you’ll be involved with will be far greater than most other equivalent positions.

Some days you’ll be spending a lot of your time with users (management, staff & students alike) helping to scope development projects, discussing features, use-cases & timescales. This will include wire-framing (we teach a lot of our students to work on Balsamiq & other Mock-up platforms) as well as traditional sketch-based collaboration.

Other days you’ll be hard at work implementing these projects, making incremental improvements to our existing systems or just coding up a tool to make all our lives a little easier! You might be working on desktop development in .Net, client-side web-development in JS [JQuery]/HTML5 or full web-application platforms in ASP.Net, Ruby on Rails or Django. We’re not dogmatic in our platform or stack use, if you can make a compelling case for it, we’re happy to work in whatever best suits the task at hand.

You’ll probably spend the occasional day responding to user bug-reports, feature enhancement requests and well as looking to optimise the systems we already have in place.

Much of our recent work has a test-driven underpinning, but like most organisations we do still have a cupboard full of legacy code that we’d love to get updated and improved!

As the senior person responsible for Dev/Ops you’ll be managing the successful deployment and operation of our code base. Much of this is currently deployed on our in-house systems, but as we continue our strategy of updating, innovating and improving we’ll be shifting onto other platforms that you’ll be helping choose. So any experience you’ve got on Heroku, AWS, Azure or Google App Engine would be put to great use.

Your job doesn’t stop at every code drop. You will also be taking time to evaluate systems that we’re currently using, migrating off those that are underperforming or addressing issues with them. We see code as an asset, and we want to get the very best out of every line written.

Finally, a typical day today may not be a typical day in one year or even 6 months’ time. We’re not satisfied with everything we’ve done so far and there are a number of things that we’d like to improve as soon as possible, so you might find yourself working in these areas in the near future.

• Online payments from Parents, integrating payment systems with internal systems and web-sites.
• Overhaul of our recruitment, personnel & HR databases and applications.
• Committing existing code trees into our Git Repositories and engaging with the wider community to help fork and improve our code base.
• Develop custom software and customised hardware for our classrooms to make them into productive teaching spaces.
• Ensure our software platforms perform at their best, regardless of the platform they are accessed from. This would enable truly friction-free working for our staff & students, both in the classroom and the wider world.
• Help the organisation succeed in its Systems Diet. We’d like to be better at embracing the ‘less is more’ is more mantra so that this will allow us to spend less time supporting the old legacy systems and more time developing the new. You will be involved in educating users and designing technical solutions that remove barriers to users in adopting the new technologies.

Other information

The school is ideally looking to recruit someone that has the required experience to make an impact on day one but where a new graduate can demonstrate excellent potential to make rapid progress in this area we will consider them for the post.

We offer a high-spec working environment with technology to suit your needs (you can choose your devices) and a focussed but collaborative open work space.

Depending on the candidate, there may be flexibility regarding pattern of hours and potential for partial remote working.

The school recognises that IT is going to continue to increase in importance as we meet unknown challenges and encounter exciting opportunities. As well as introducing this role we are increasing our first tier support to ensure that we ring-fence much of the capacity you & our senior IT staff to manage the higher level IT issues and developments.

If you think that you would enjoy the challenges above we would love to hear from you.

Salary:

Starting Salary: £24,989 -£40,940pa (depending on experience)

Start date
ASAP
From
Hacker Jobs UK
Published at
31.01.2014
Contact person:
Steve Buckley
Project ID:
659103
Contract type
Freelance
Workplace
100 % remote
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