Head of Development, .NET Environment, European Online Retailer

Head of Development, .NET Environment, European Online Retailer, London.


One of the UK's leading Retail organisations (80% online, 20% offline) are looking for a Head of Development to join the company and work closely alongside their newly appointed CTO.


The company received substantial investment from a PE 2 years ago. Since this time, and with thanks to their new CTO (a very well recognized figure in the .COM world) they have re-aligned their business goals and subsequently their entire IT strategy. Change is going to be at the heart of these plans - developing and introducing new platforms and products, redeveloping existing platforms and products with the aim of increasing online sales by 30% yr 1 and up to 50% by yr 2. Sounds ambitious, but given the plans they have laid down, the current (and future team) and the introduction of a new Head of Development they are all very realistic goals.


So, who is going to be suitable for this role? The role is not hands-on so no coding involved, it is expected however that you'll still have an appreciation of code and be able to make confident technical decisions about technology moving forward. The development stack right now is a mix of .Net so we'd hope you have prior experience managing teams within a .Net environment. As well as heading - up the development team, Testing/QA will also fall under your remit too so again - prior experience managing both a development and testing team is going to be very useful.


In terms of development environments, the firm has made big steps over the last year to a more Agile/Scrum way of working. Daily stand-ups, weekly releases, TDD and BDD. We've reviewed already what the key development languages being utilised are, in terms of testing - there are a small team of 4 testers, all a mix of Manual and Automation - the push being to head more and more down the automated route in the future (tech stack for testing: Selenium Web Driver, C#, BDD and Specflow).


The team you'll be taking over are very committed to the company. That said, there has been a lot of change recently which can unrest people at times. Given this, you'll need to be (as well as everything above) an effective man-manager - we really cannot emphasise this enough. We need to meet people who have prior experience, managing a development/QA team, have successfully built these teams up and who are proud by retention ratio's they achieved in such teams. Also arguably a more minor point to note, it's one which the CTO has highlighted as being of great importance to him and something he'll be keen to find out more about an interview.


Hopefully this gives you a flavour of what we're looking for. If you're keen to find out more then please do get in touch ASAP. I am contactable either via phone - 0203 011 1501 or email at ben.charlton@fpit.co.uk