Lead Developer

Why we're hiring:

WPP ET is undergoing a significant transformation to modernise ways of working and adopt cloud-based, micro-service architectures, automation, and digitised user experiences. Within this transition, the Lead Developer plays a strategic engineering role in the Chase Media Central programme, ensuring the platform’s custom extensions, integrations, data flows, and application components are built to enterprise standards and remain stable as the programme scales across regions. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you provide architectural direction for integration patterns, lead development work, guide developers through complex technical problems, and define coding standards and engineering best practices. You act as the technical authority for integrations and platform components, ensuring that all custom code interacting with Business Central, local applications, and market-specific systems is reliable, scalable, and maintainable. You work closely with Product, QA, Implementation, Data, BI, and market teams to ensure code, interfaces, and workflows align with business requirements while maintaining high engineering quality. You will also contribute to requirement refinement, solution design, technical documentation, code reviews, and production troubleshooting. Success in this role is defined by strong engineering output, predictable delivery, high-quality integrations and application components, well-supported developers, and trust from product and market stakeholders.

What you'll be doing:

Technical Leadership & Engineering Standards

• Provide technical direction for development activities across integrations, application components, and platform workflows.
• Define and enforce coding standards, branching strategies, documentation expectations, and review practices.
• Lead code reviews and ensure consistent engineering quality across all developers.
• Translate complex technical requirements into clear, implementable designs and patterns.

Application & Integration Development

• Design and develop high-quality solutions across C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server, Azure services, and related Microsoft technologies.
• Build and maintain integration components between Media Central (Business Central) and local or global media/finance systems.
• Prepare detailed technical design documentation and contribute to the refinement of user stories and backlog items.
• Participate in testing activities (unit, regression, functional), supporting QA teams through defect clarification and validation.

Platform Reliability & Issue Resolution

• Investigate and resolve complex technical issues, ensuring clear communication and structured root-cause analysis.
• Support business-critical applications and ensure continuity through robust troubleshooting and fix delivery.
• Create and maintain support guides, release notes, and knowledge-sharing artefacts to ensure operational readiness.

Cross-Functional Coordination

• Work closely with BI, QA, Data, Implementation, and Product teams to ensure that technical solutions align with business needs and programme objectives.
• Collaborate with vendor teams to clarify requirements, validate behaviours, and maintain alignment with global delivery timelines. Continuous Improvement & Technical Enablement
• Champion development best practices, modern engineering techniques, automation opportunities, and process enhancements.
• Provide coaching and guidance to developers and junior engineers to build capability and improve code quality.
• Drive reusability, standardisation, and performance improvements across integration and application components.

What you'll need:

Essential Technical Skills

• 5–7 years of application development experience with deep expertise in Microsoft technologies (C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server, Azure).

• Strong understanding of integration practices (e.g., REST patterns, scheduled data sync, data transformation logic).

• Solid grounding in development methodologies (Agile, Waterfall), CI/CD, version control, and modern DevOps-aligned workflows.

• Ability to design and review technical architecture components, data flows, interface contracts, and solution documentation.

• Experience preparing and validating technical specifications, user stories, test cases, and design artefacts.

Professional & Leadership Skills

• Ability to lead and support developers in complex problem-solving and architectural decisions.
• Strong analytical capability with the ability to break down technical challenges and propose scalable solutions.
• Excellent communication skills, able to collaborate with technical and non-technical stakeholders across multiple regions.
• High attention to detail; proactive, flexible mindset; strong ownership of delivery.

Desirable Skills

• Experience with O365 SaaS development tools (PowerApps, Power BI, Power Automate).
• Familiarity working with Business Central or other ERP systems (SAP/Oracle).
• Exposure to BI/ETL workflows, data reconciliation, and cross-system data dependency management..

Who you are:

You're open: We are inclusive and collaborative; we encourage the free exchange of ideas; we respect and celebrate diverse views. We are open-minded: to new ideas, new partnerships, new ways of working.

You're optimistic: We believe in the power of creativity, technology and talent to create brighter futures or our people, our clients and our communities. We approach all that we do with conviction: to try the new and to seek the unexpected.

You're extraordinary: we are stronger together: through collaboration we achieve the amazing. We are creative leaders and pioneers of our industry; we provide extraordinary every day.

What we'll give you:

Passionate, inspired people – We aim to create a culture in which people can do extraordinary work.

Scale and opportunity – We offer the opportunity to create, influence and complete projects at a scale that is unparalleled in the industry.

Challenging and stimulating work – Unique work and the opportunity to join a group of creative problem solvers. Are you up for the challenge?

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