Project Manager
at Red Gate

Project Manager

  Also known as: ScrumMaster : Agile Project Manager

At Red Gate, it’s the project managers who make it all hang together. Building top-notch, ingeniously simple products is difficult and our project managers are the ones who know how to harness the talents of the amazing people in their team to make that happen.

 As the project manager of one of our small, cross-functional teams, you’ll be empowered to lead the team in creating great software in an ambitious, supportive and relaxed environment. You’ll be responsible for driving the development process for one of our products and helping the team to work like a finely-tuned machine whilst having a healthy dose of fun.

What makes you a Red Gate project manager?

• You’re excited by the challenge of building a small, close-knit team who have fun developing great software
• You take pride in your team, but are never satisfied with the status quo
• You’ve got a whole heap of ideas you are just dying to try out, but you know that you’ve really won when the team come up with more ideas than you thanks to that great sprint retrospective you ran
• You know how to turn those ideas into reality
• You know that technical debt is sometimes a necessary evil, but you are determined to pay it off as soon as you can
• You can open the code up yourself to find out what’s going on
• You understand why you can’t build a great product without amazing test engineers
• Products with poor user experience drive you NUTS
• You know when it’s better to lead your team to a consensus than impose a decision
• You know when it’s better to make a decision than get bogged down in debate
• You have great understanding of agile development principles and practices and know that agile means discipline, not sloppiness
• You know that there is more to successful agile than reading some books (but you’ve probably read a hefty stack of them and know which ideas have worked for you)
• You could explain to a new starter how to estimate using story points and velocity
• You can write a great user story
• You know how to make a backlog estimation session fun!
• You have terrific time-management and communication skills
• You understand how and why Scrum, Lean, XP & FDD are effective ways of working with projects & teams, but aren’t obsessive about which is “right”
• You’re following and learning about project management trends beyond just software development, can align these to your team’s activities and have even tried a few new ideas of your own out.

What experience do you have?

• Either a 2:1 or a 1st in a numerate or scientific subject, such as Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering, or Physics, or significant industry experience
• You've worked as a software engineer or software tester in a previous life (and can still write some code, even if it’s a little rusty)
• You’ve run at least 3 projects or release cycles as an agile project manager/ScrumMaster, preferably with a small co-located team (even better if it included test engineers and user experience specialists)
• You’ve got a great track-record of successful projects (and a corresponding collection of lessons that you’ve learnt from them)
• You know your way around source control systems, CI servers and  bug tracking systems (we currently use SVN, TeamCity and JIRA)
• You have experience with automated tests, code reviews, pairing and possibly even TDD
• You can give us a long list of improvements that you’ve made to the way your current team works
• You have experience line-managing members of your team, or taking some responsibility for their personal development

What's the package?

• All those lovely Red Gate perks.
• You'll work about 40 hours a week, Monday to Friday, with flexible work time.
• Salary is negotiable, depending on experience (please tell us your current salary in your covering letter).
• You'll have the best tools, infrastructure, and hardware. And if you need something extra, you'll get it pronto.
• You'll be part of one of our multi-skilled teams, sitting in a small division with sales, marketing, and other parts of the business.

What else should you consider?

• You'll see the success of your products in downloads, revenue, and customer feedback.
• Finding out a bit more about the recruitment process...