Principal Engineer, Kooth
£100-110k
Effective personalised digital mental health care platform
Open for applications
Effective personalised digital mental health care platform
201-500 employees
Open for applications
£100-110k
201-500 employees
Company mission
Kooth's mission is to create easy to access online mental health services that work alongside you to provide compassionate and effective support.
Role
Who you are
- Deep knowledge of software architecture patterns
- Knowledge of best practices in software engineering
- Ability to work in a fast-moving environment and to design flexible technical solutions
- Strong security awareness, as required in a regulated environment
- Ability to collaborate across teams and department to achieve commercial outcomes
- Ability to coach and mentor
- Commercial outlook
- Bias to action and ability to foster a culture of pragmatic delivery alongside technical excellence
- Strong stakeholder management
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related, or equivalent work experience
What the job involves
- Reports to: CTO/VP Engineering
- Solve problems and deliver solutions that impact the engineering organisation as a whole
- Identify and take ownership of technical challenges: identifying and formalising the problem, devising a solution, leading its implementation, and training the rest of the organisation to leverage it
- Raise the bar for all of product and engineering; be a force multiplier in your interactions with teams and team members
- Be a coach, advisor, and mentor, as well as a technology and industry expert. You are capable of mentoring anyone, including your more senior counterparts, in your particular areas of expertise
- You recognise that the best results come though working as a team but you are also able to work independently when required, including e.g. mitigations, estimation, prediction, design
- Be proactive, model a bias for action, lead on quick decision-making, and have a focus on delivery and outcomes
- Be responsible, with your fellow Principal Engineers and the Principal Architect, for our architecture being fit for purpose
- Design more complex parts of the system, producing design documents and driving collaboration and a shared understanding of technical direction
- “Execution through influence”. Whilst senior engineers are individual contributors, a principal engineer is an influencing contributor
- Guide tech leads where necessary and use your technical expertise and your view of the wider Kooth landscape to help achieve the best outcomes
- Be deeply involved in cross-functional planning for work you’ve committed to, and take ownership of outcomes based on your decisions
- Document "load-bearing" decisions, so people coming later can understand why we made those decisions & what else we considered. Socialise those documents and make sure they're discoverable
- Be able to break down large technical workstreams into manageable chunks and communicate those to others so the work can be better managed, and understand implementation, e.g. what must be done in which order, what work could be parallelised
- Guide our tech estate to be internally consistent, being pragmatic about decisions that don’t align with the general technical direction and disciplined about bringing it back on track
- Have the knowledge, judgement, and understanding to work cross-functionally with your business and product partners to make decisions about the roadmap
- Communicate technical ideas to a wide range of stakeholders, including more junior engineers, senior leadership including the CTO, and to colleagues in other parts of the business. You are able to pull out the key points relevant to the people you are communicating with
- Provide advice and guidance on key technical areas
- Understand key needs of your stakeholders in engineering, product and the wider business and be able to be flexible and pragmatic on how we meet those needs
- Partner with Product, Delivery, and others to help frame and align engineering priorities so that we deliver rapid value to our customers. Work closely with Product, Delivery and others in order to identify where delays elsewhere impact work you've outlined, then clearly communicate and mitigate or communicate mitigations
- Model consistency, integrity, reliability, and ease of interaction with engineering to the rest of the business
- Anticipate future technical needs and take ownership of proposing a course of action. This could be to do with risks to existing strategy, learnings from production or changes in the wider technical landscape
- Understand the external landscape that Kooth engineering exists in. You must keep up with trends, great practice, competitor products/projects, etc
- Understand the internal landscape of what we are building and the customer outcomes we deliver to support us in making the best technical decisions with the information we have
- Work with engineering leadership peers to support the CTO in growing and driving the tech strategy. Own specific areas of the tech strategy yourself
- This is not an exhaustive list
Our take
Kooth offers free at the point of access mental health care to more than 5.4 million people via NHS commissioners, corporates, social workers, GPs and schools across the UK. It provides a mix of community-created content, forum sessions with other community members, and one-to-one counselling via online chat. All users sign up anonymously for the free-of-charge service and there's no digital tracking of session IP addresses. The aim is to provide a safe space where each person can get the support they need.
As a pioneer in online counselling, Kooth brings together emerging technologies with innovation in clinical practice and evaluation to create new models of care in mental health. The 2020-hired CEO Tim Barker’s data science experience will prove very useful in exploring whether there are patterns in its historic dataset that can be helpful to future users.
Kooth’s 2020 IPO came at a time when London listings were sparse. A testament to the important contribution its services can make at a time when businesses are becoming more conscious of the need to foster well-being in their employees and in the wider world. This is further exemplified by the 33% soar in share prices after a contract was announced to serve 13 to 25-year-olds in California.
Freddie
Company Specialist
Insights
Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
10% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company benefits
- 28 days (plus Public Holidays)
- Yearly professional training programmes structured around you
- Pension contributions
- Remote Working
- Healthshield Care plan
- EAP programme, 24/7 Telephone Mental Health & GP
- Annual company share option awards
- Life Assurance (up to four times the amount of your annual salary)
- Cycle to Work Scheme
- Incapacity Income Protection
Company values
- Alongside you - We are alongside you, warm, welcoming and companionable
- Flexible - We offer choice because you are in control of what you need
- Compassionate - We don’t judge. We listen, counsel and support
- Committed - No matter what support you need, we’re here to help
- Safe - We are a safe space for users and we are serious about safeguarding
Company HQ
Paddington, London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Tim Barker
(CEO, not founder)Worked previously as the CEO at DataSift and in Platform and Go-to-Market strategy at Meltwater after the company's acquisition of DataSift. Became Kooth's CEO in 2020.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Kooth
- LGBTQIA+ Inform, Support, Change & Celebrate campaign
Share this job
View 1 more job at Kooth