Principal Engineer (Front-end)

INTRODUCTION

Founded in 1856 by Thomas Burberry, Burberry is a global luxury brand with a distinctly British attitude. We are a global business with an extensive network of both owned and franchised stores across EMEIA, Asia Pacific and Americas. We are digital pioneers, and innovative technology underpins every aspect of our business, from product design to distribution and marketing. We believe that modern luxury means being socially and environmentally responsible; this mindset is core to our business and key to our long-term success.

WHY JOIN US

You will be at the heart of Burberry's new engineering strategy, helping us build an in-house engineering teams and developing a culture that makes Burberry a great place to work. We will achieve this by bringing on great people and empowering them to build amazing products for our customers.

Our team is responsible for the wide range of applications and products that power Burberry digital including burberry.com, native mobile apps, creating technology (e.g. NFTs, gaming, etc) and the technology that is present in our physical stores.

While your teams need to be technically capable, we will work together to create our engineering culture whereby the engineers are confident, happy, motivated, and developing themselves.

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

Technology

Although Burberry is a very well-known FTSE 100 company, we have very few tech boundaries; the microservices platform was recently implemented on then-new serverless AWS tech (so successfully that we gave a talk at AWS Summit in Las Vegas), and we continually trial betas of AWS and other tech solutions to see how we could use them, while having regular calls with AWS to understand and trial new features and capabilities.

We are building an internal open source shared library.

We aim for serverless solutions - lambdas, fargate - where feasible. Mostly we use nodejs for backend, node and react on the frontend. Infrastructure as Code is either Terraform or AWS CDK. We're big on automation. We have gitlab for CI, snyk for security testing, an internal performance engineering team ensuring your solutions meet high standards.

Stability

Our platforms and applications are extremely stable and we focus on building new features and trialing new tech. The number of critical incidents has reduced significantly over the past few years thanks to our investment in Observability, including teams being responsible for their application in production (we call it Run What You Wrote). We have a weekly Reliability call for lucky team members to take us through their system's telemetry, highlighting issues and improvements; this shares knowledge and promotes trust in our systems and our teams' ability to support them.

Global-Local

The Burberry brand is known around the world, and our technology must support customers everywhere. Localisation is the key part of our strategy - we tailor our customer experiences online in many regions. From overcoming global technical restrictions, to building for users on all devices, we need to give Burberry consumers the highest quality luxury digital retail experience globally.

JOB PURPOSE

What's the biggest technical challenge you've faced as a senior engineer? How does it compare to a defining, implementing, and overseeing the development of a premium luxury-brand website that runs in over 10 languages and dozens of countries?

You've likely heard of Burberry already, and if you haven't, you might want to look it up as it. We're looking for a fairly niche individual who can help us continue to evolve our team and our offerings with a focus on the customer-experience, the teams that build it, and the ability to flexibly meet new challenges and opportunities, as they present themselves.

Your first focus, as Principal Engineer, is the team: Enable them, encourage them, amplify them -- help them reach the goals they never thought they'd be able to achieve. Second to that, you'll be focused on making the code quality and the developer experience better through standardisation, mentoring, and improved tooling. Lastly, it's your job to advocate and act as a communications conduit, between product, engineering, and delivery teams, so that each team feels like part of the larger whole, and each team has the ability to positively impact the others.

The tech of the role revolves around the front end, but it crosses a lot of lines as we're evolving our overall architecture to include a federated GraphQL service layer, a modular design system, and a shared code library. As such, you will need to work with the backend teams, DevOps, security, and delivery teams to make sure that decisions made in one area of the business do not negatively impact the ability for front end teams to deliver (and vice versa).

The skillset we're looking for is vast, and it should be clear that this isn't a hands-on day-to-day coding role -- though you need to be able to get into the guts of the code through code reviews, advise, discussions, and technical forums. The primary goal of this role is to _amplify_ teams, not to write the code that others could write just as easily. Your role is to _enable_ them, and to _support_ them, so that _they_ can do more. It's important to remember that teams can scale, and individuals can't, so the question you need to answer is: How can you help make everyone else around you better, in an ongoing, iterative, and patient way that delivers real, meaningful, measurable value to the business? Secondly, how can you use technology, automation, and tooling to help your teams better themselves and the things they produce?

RESPONSIBILITIES

Ultimately, the purpose of the role is to be the expert that everyone goes to when high level decisions need to be made about front end related tools, processes, architecture, and people - you are there to listen, advise, encourage, assess, inspire, and enable the teams to achieve better, faster, and more efficient results.

Key responsibilities include:

- Stakeholder management

- Being a resource for Tech Leads

- Advising on strategy, proposals, and opportunities

- Review & assess proposed solutions

- Propose solutions to complex problems

- Oversee implementation of CI/CD Pipelines

- Define and own technical strategy for Front End

- Fostering a collaborative, motivated working environment

- Managing and prioritising front-end tech debt

- Optimisation through automation

PERSONAL PROFILE

The role of the principal engineer for front end requires a combination of strong technical skills, excellent communication skills, and the ability to influence both technical and non-technical people that have a wide spectrum of knowledge and experience. As such, you will need the following:

Expert Level Knowledge

- vanilla JavaScript

- TypeScript

- Node.js

- React

- CSS

- Design Systems

- Git (including Hooks, Trailers, and Workflows)

- Code Reviews & Mentoring

- CI/CD Pipelines

- NPM Package Publishing

- Docker Images and Publishing

- Shared Component Architecture

- Event-Based Architecture

- MFE (Micro Front Ends)

- Express

- Next.js

- Caching (at various layers)

- Telemetry & Observation

- Modular Design

- Design Patterns

- JavaScript Middleware

- JavaScript profiling

- Inter-Frame Communication (PostMessage)

- Semantic Versioning & Release Cadences

- Data Structure Design (e.g. TypeScript Types, Schemas)

Mid-Level Knowledge (Minimum)

- DevOps Background (AWS Preferred)

- Lamdba Function Experience

- Multi-Language/Multi-Region Software

- Automated Code Generation & Scaffolding

- Template-based Development

- Micro-Service Architecture

Nice To Have Experience & Skills

- Apollo GraphQL Gateway

- Dynamic Content Strategies

- Personalised User Journeys

- Kubernetes Experience

- React Native Experience

- Queuing & Retries

- Content Management Systems Design

- Solid experience with 3 or more software development languages (e.g. trade offs, design patterns, best practices, etc.)

Personality

- Technically Minded

- People Oriented

- Strategic Thinker (e.g. 3 steps ahead)

- Practical / Tactical

- Proactive

- Autonomous

- Leader

FOOTER

Burberry is an Equal Opportunities Employer and as such, treats all applications equally and recruits purely on the basis of skills and experience.

Posting Notes: United Kingdom || Not Applicable || London || IT || DIGITAL || n/a ||