About the role

We’re looking for an engineering manager to join the GovPress team at an exciting time for the business unit at dxw. There are currently eleven team members who build and support the WordPress websites we look after and we have thrilling plans for growth over the next year and beyond. This role would suit somebody who is comfortable shaping and leading this growth, working closely with our project and platform lead developers, operations lead and the head of GovPress.

This is a management role. You’ll be line manager for people in the GovPress team and will be a part of the GovPress leadership team. You'll support sales, recruitment and delivery, contribute to the direction of internal product development and occasionally get into the code. 

In the GovPress team, we work as a multi-disciplinary product team across three strands of work - client projects, client support and internal platform/product development. Alongside other team members, you’ll help with the delivery of this work, for example, by facilitating planning sessions, sharing progress at show & tells or by catching up with client teams.

You’ll work with the sales team and other members of GovPress to help us shape, pitch, and win work. You’ll build relationships with some of our long-standing clients and help find opportunities for us to make public services better.

You’ll also support recruitment and our plans to grow the team. Once you’ve settled in, you’ll help shape roles, lead recruitment campaigns and make hiring decisions.

We work in an agile way (but we don’t follow it too strictly) and hope to inspire our clients with our practices. We try to use the right technology for the problem at hand. Here are some the product team works with:

• PHP and WordPress

• HTML, CSS and JavaScript

• Git and GitHub

• Python and Wagtail

Knowledge of PHP and WordPress would be useful, but not essential and we don't expect you to have experience with anything else – you can pick up particular skills and tools as you need them, and we're eager to help you learn.

At dxw, we have a culture of sharing our skills and knowledge, and you’ll advocate for that behaviour by leading by example.

About dxw & GovPress

dxw has been around since 2008, working with the public and third sectors to create services and products that improve lives – things like helping to track aid spending and looking at how to improve digital collaboration between local authorities. 

As well as making life better for the people who use public services and the teams that run them, we care a lot about being a great place to work and grow. Last year we became employee-owned, which means that a trust owns 90% of our shares on behalf of all current and future dxw staff, and staff get to influence the direction of the company and share in its profits. We’ve incorporated our mission and values into the trust deeds too, so dxw must also be run in the interests of the people who use the services we build.

Within dxw, there is a GovPress team and business unit. GovPress is dxw’s website development, hosting, and support service for public sector and charitable organisations - mainly in WordPress and Wagtail CMS.

We’ve been working with WordPress for over 13 years and we offer a range of bespoke services. The service hosts high profile websites like NHS England and the Government’s campaign platforms, with long-running campaigns such as Fire Kills and Floods Destroy.

We work remotely with people based all around the UK. We keep in touch all the time for work and for social things, and some of us get together in person in our Leeds HQ and coworking spaces in London when we can.

If you care about making public services better then dxw is the place for you!

About you

You’ve worked on at least one software project in the last 5 years that has had contact with real users in the real world. You enjoy variety in your work and like the idea of working as one product team across a range of projects for a range of clients.

You have led others in the past, perhaps as a line manager or a technical lead.

You’re open to learning from the people you manage. You recognise that management is a support role that isn’t “above” individual contributor roles and that the people you manage might know more than you. You work in a supportive way, helping others solve problems through curiosity, but also offer your experience when appropriate.

You have a solid understanding of how to write production software, working knowledge of Git, and know or are willing to learn some of the technologies we use as you come across them on the job. You write tests as a normal part of your software development work and document and share the things you learn with others.

You understand the importance of secure coding practices. All technologists receive security training when they join the team.

Our public sector work means that appointments will be made subject to a background check and you must be living in and eligible to work in the UK.

Join us!

We are committed to making our teams as diverse as we can and creating an environment where everyone feels included and can be themselves. We welcome non-traditional paths into the development profession and aim to hire the right person for the role, not the right combination of technical keywords. We especially encourage candidates historically excluded from technology to apply, including but not limited to people of colour, women and people whose gender doesn’t always align neatly with “man” or “woman”, parents and carers, people with visible and invisible disabilities and atypical neurotypes, and people who didn’t go to university.

For more information about dxw, visit our website or our Playbook where we document the ways we work, our values, and our commitments to sustainable pace and openness.

If you have any questions around the role, we’d be pleased to answer them. Send a message to recruitment@dxw.com and we’ll get back to you.