Salsa Technical Leads own and drive the technical vision for Salsa projects. The Technical Lead is responsible for implementation blueprint and overall technical solution direction, technical governance and engineering process. Technical leads also own user story estimations, code reviews, peering, technical coaching, troubleshooting, etc. The technical lead is the right-hand person to the Salsa Engagement Manager.
Technical Lead responsibilities
As a Salsa Technical Lead duties include:
Pre-sale and discovery responsibilities
- High level solution direction/technical blueprint
- Development estimates using Salsa’s standard estimation tools and models
- Technical risk assessment
- Technical issues
- Technical assumptions
- Pre-requisite standards compliance
- Client-facing technical communication, written and/or verbal
Project execution (incl. discovery)
- Sprint planning and technical delivery approach
- Review functional matrix
- Review and comment on design packs
- Collaborate on storyboard
- Discovery workshop participation/lead
- Solution direction, including writing project technical specification
- Tool and process selection and implementation, e.g. Github, processes, etc.
- Tailoring relevant templated checklists for the project, e.g. environment setup, go live, etc.
- Grooming stories and finalising acceptance criteria
- Onboarding development team
- Development estimates/Planning Poker (as a participant)
- Challenge estimates as part of estimate grooming process
- Be accountable for groomed/agreed estimates
- Conduct code reviews
- Client-facing technical communications (written and/or verbal)
- Escalation point for developers
- Release notes/plan
- Routine timeline/resource estimates on request
- Lead the development team and and hold self and team accountable to Salsa values
Retrospectives
- Help embed high priority findings into Salsa technical core
Solution design
- Accountable for solution direction documentation to guide developers
- Accountable for integration solutions where applicable
- Creation of standard technical design/solution documentation that leverages Salsa best practice
- Consideration of custom frameworks and reusable modules
- Represents recommended solutions, and options, to clients
Development and project delivery
- Software development of code using best practice and adhering to Salsa development processes
- Other required implementations (e.g. installation, configuration, customisation, integration, data migration)
- Communicates with project/SCRUM management when project deadlines are at risk of not being met
- Internal documentation of authored program code
Salsa Digital marketing contributions
- Prepare for and present at conferences, events and Meetups as needed
- Represent the Salsa Digital brand and values in all external-facing interactions
- Network and create constructive relationships with the public and clients
- Identify sales opportunities (professionally) and pass on sales leads to Business Development Managers
Drupal community contributions
- Create an open source community contribution culture with all Salsa developers
- Evangelise and contribute to a DevRel culture in establishing a relationship with external developers
- Maintain an active Drupal profile
- Maintain Salsa’s Drupal profile with support from Salsa developers
- Represent Salsa at Drupal Meetups and other forums via presentations and attendance
- Make and coordinate contributions on an ongoing basis with attribution to yourself and Salsa
- Encourage team contributions from all other developers
- Actively monitor and contribute to relevant community ‘places’ (e.g. GovCMS) including Slack, etc.
- Coordinate community Q&A responses with support from the Salsa technical team
- Report and share community insights and metrics with the Salsa team each fortnight at the Salsa team meeting
Maintain up-to-date Drupal knowledge and skills
- Keep informed on the latest relevant dev tech news and developments
Drupal training sessions (if required)
- Take responsibility for the preparation, running and follow-up actions required for each training session
- Modify presentation and student manual material as needed
- Represent the Salsa Digital brand and values in all client/student facing interactions
- Network and create constructive relationships with clients/students
- Identify sales opportunities (professionally) and pass on sales leads to Business Development Managers
Infrastructure, DevOps, patching and automation (if required)
- Design, build and maintain Salsa hosting environments and services
- Lead and maintain consistent DevOps processes around deployments
- Lead and maintain consistent DevOps processes and automation around patching
- Lead and maintain consistent test frameworks, automation and test libraries to lower the barrier to deployments, increase agility and overall quality of continuous delivery
Requirements
Must haves
- Exceptional communication skills both verbally and written
- 5-10+ years demonstrated experience in the delivery of open source enterprise digital solutions, using Drupal as framework
- 2-5+ years of demonstrated experience in the technical leadership of enterprise digital solutions using agile delivery methodologies
Nice to haves
- Established footprint within the open source community
- Industry infrastructure, DevOps, automation experience. Any of: Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, containerised architectures well regarded
Salsa Technical Leads
About Salsa
Salsa Digital is a Melbourne-based agency with a 16+ year legacy in open source. Currently Salsa is made up of approximately 25-30 Salsarians.
Salsa has become a key contributor to helping governments become more open, more consolidated and more connected.
Salsa is entrusted by the Australian Government (Department of Finance) as the exclusive delivery partner for the next generation GovCMS platform. Salsa has also been entrusted by the Victorian Government as the implementation partner for the Single Digital Presence platform.
On behalf of the Victorian Government, Salsa also manages the open data platform (data.vic.gov.au) designed, built and hosted on CKAN (open source data management system).
Salsa is a values-driven agency with a strong open source and transparent ethos.
Salsa is recognised as an open source digital platform leader in government at state and federal level. Salsa has earnt this reputation through delivery of high profile programs of work and also via the production of thought-leading content.
Benefits
All Salsa Digital employees may expect the following benefits:
Work with others that genuinely want to deliver great work
Be part of a company with a genuine open, transparent and accountable ethos
Become part of an environment where you can contribute and respectfully challenge areas that could be improved, and be well received
Be part of a company with a strong and focused vision to build a more open government
Be part of a company with a strong culture of pushing the boundaries further
Flexible remote/on-site working arrangements
Work with a team of professionals in a flat organisational culture
Attend professional conferences and events that support and improve your insights and thus knowledge to produce great work