Savanta Hiring for Senior or Staff Software Engineer | Canada, Waterloo, ON at Toronto, ON Full Time

Savanta is one of the fastest growing agencies in market research with teams in the UK, Americas, and APAC. With technology at the heart of our business, we inform and inspire clients to Make Better Decisions through powerful data, high impact consulting, and bespoke solutions. Our market-leading products and specialist teams in sector, methodology, and audience (e.g. students, and high net worth individuals), help clients ranging from global giants to locally loved brands, government bodies, and non-profits.

Our technology platform, online services, and the products we run on them underpin all of our operations. They enable us to provide a full service offering to our clients, from scripting, fieldwork, and data collection, through to analysis and delivery, including via direct integration with our APIs. We’re looking for a talented Senior (or Staff) Software Engineer with previous management experience to join our technology team and help us develop and grow that platform.

Our team is made up of roughly 30 people organized into cross-functional development teams that include engineers, a user experience designer, QA, and product management. We also have a support team who work directly with both internal and external customers.

At present we’re based around Cambridge in the UK with a few of our team in India, Australia, and New Zealand. Most of us work from home most of the time, and we see both hybrid and remote working being the norm going forward. For our Canadian hub we do ask that you live within easy travelling distance of Waterloo, ON to enable face to face working once a week as soon as that becomes viable.

Our plan to expand our technology team into Canada

Our evolving roadmap is full of ambitious and exciting delivery milestones across the full range of our products and services. We are also an increasingly global organisation, with substantial and growing teams in the US, Canada, and India, and other employees based around the globe.

Our technology team is increasingly responsible for developing and supporting systems that are used round the clock by both ourselves, and our clients. As a result we’ve decided to begin the process of building a development team centred around Waterloo, Ontario, to the west of the Greater Toronto Area, in Canada.

We’re beginning by hiring software engineers in this area. These engineers will initially be attached to our UK-based development teams – don’t worry: working normal EST hours! This will allow them to build knowledge and understanding of our business, platform, and systems. In time we would like to hire the other roles that will enable us to build a full cross-functional development team based around Waterloo, and working on their own projects to enhance Savanta’s platform offer.

With this role we’re looking for a senior or staff grade software engineer with previous management experience to provide some leadership for that team. We are not looking for a first time manager here, or necessarily somebody who is ambitious to progress as a manager, but we are looking for somebody who has spent a few years in management and can provide local leadership, coaching, and mentoring to a small team of graduate to mid-level developers.

Whilst everyone on the team will be working with a team in the UK, possibly for quite some time, we think it’s important to have local leadership in place on the ground to provide

support and guidance to that team, particularly in the afternoon in Canada, much of which is after business hours in the UK.

Senior Software Engineer role

As a Senior Software Engineer, you can expect to get hands-on, see the impact of your work very quickly. We’re small but agile team: our projects last between two and six weeks, although we often work on initiatives that run over longer timespans, we aim to divide these up into smaller projects and aim to ship regularly. Throughout our development process we work very closely with stakeholders: both internally and externally.

We’ll also give you the room to learn from a supportive and collaborative team, with time set aside that you can use for professional development and more self-directed work on a regular basis.

Day to day, your key focus areas will include:
Full stack development, working with distributed systems;

Delivering a great user experience in the products you build;

Helping cross-functional teams deliver a variety of interesting projects;

Finding ways to build fast, scalable, flexible systems without blowing the budget;

Interacting directly with customers, understanding their needs, and generalising them into something that can address the needs of an entire class of users, be they internal or external;

Providing necessary leadership, support, mentoring, and coaching to the Canadian engineering team.

Our tech stack includes:
.NET 5 (shortly upgrading to 6): C#, with ASP.NET Web API, for our mid-tier and back-end services;

React and TypeScript for our front-end;

SQL Server for data storage;

Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform for hosting and infrastructure;

GitHub, Azure Dev Pipelines, and Octopus Deploy for continuous delivery

About You

We’re looking for somebody with demonstrable experience of software engineering and management experience. You might be somebody who’s been a team lead before, or you might have managed at a more senior level but perhaps have found that you preferred engineering, or looking after smaller teams.

Ordinarily we’d suggest that you don’t need to know .NET or C#, but that a strong OO background in a comparable language such as Java or C++ would be sufficient. Due to the nature of this role, which will involve helping less experienced developers who may lack a background in .NET, we ask that you have a minimum of 2 – 3 years experience specifically with C# and .NET, in addition to your other OO experience. Understanding the functional idioms available in more modern versions of these languages would also be a strong advantage. Beyond this, a willingness to learn – new technologies, our business and platform, and ways of working – is an absolute must.

You don’t need to know SQL Server, but we do need somebody with strong RDBMS experience and who knows at least one dialect of SQL well: for example, you might have spent a lot of time with PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Oracle, and if you have then you’ll pick up SQL Server with no problems.

Exposure to user experience work is a strong advantage, and you need to be on board with the idea that the user interface, and supporting documentation, training materials, etc., are a key component of any product, and not an afterthought.

You need to be familiar with modern development practices, and capable of running meetings such as project kick-offs, stakeholder check-ins, and retrospectives. We are small-a agile (we actually use a modified version of a process called Shape Up), work closely with stakeholders, use source control, implement a CD pipeline, work remotely, use a variety of different cloud services and SaaS providers. We also often modify or design new working practices and processes as our business grows and evolves, so you should be comfortable with managed change.

Finally, and in many ways most importantly, you’ll also be someone who enjoys building and improving products, is comfortable with some ambiguity and shifting priorities in your work environment. It’s also important that you take pride in and stand by your work.

Why Join Us

With offices in the UK, US, Canada, and India, 450 staff globally, and ambitious growth plans, Savanta offers the benefits of scale, whilst our specialist teams make life at Savanta feel more like working at a smaller agency. Our client portfolio includes some of the world’s best known brands, including Google, LEGO, Unilever, HSBC, Sainsbury’s, ITV, Pandora, Wagamama, The Cabinet Office, Formula 1, Sport England, and Heineken.

Part of the vibrant Next 15 Communications Group, we have an entrepreneurial company culture that actively recognises and values its people and offers unrivalled scope for career development. As well as a competitive salary and generous annual leave, we offer an excellent benefits package covering health & wellbeing (gym membership, private medical, etc.), financial health (pension, life assurance, etc.) and flexible working practices, incl. hybrid working.

Savanta is committed to being an equal opportunities employer and continuously strives to be an employer of choice. Our people are our greatest asset – we value workplace diversity and inclusion, oppose all forms of unlawful discrimination, and welcome applications from suitably qualified candidates of all backgrounds.