Senior Specialist, Software Engineer - Engineering

At McLaren, our mission is to set the standard for high performance in sport. Everyone, in every part of the team, has a role to play. So if you want to test your ideas with the world watching... And measure your progress in milliseconds... And play your part in racing history... You belong here. High performance starts with you.

Purpose of the Role:

The pinnacle of motorsport excellence is built on a foundation of strong reliability of the team, processes, and the racing car. The Reliability Software Engineering role is responsible for building and operating the tools which allow McLaren F1 to achieve the highest levels of operational reliability. This role will work closely with end users to design and implement software tools which track and manage issues and faults across manufacturing, logistics, car build, and race days. Innovation around finding patterns and relationships between faults and issues will be key, by using data, analytics, and machine learning to deliver world championship reliability tools.

Role Dimensions:

The Software & Data Science group in McLaren F1 is responsible for the analysis, design, and delivery of software tools and methodologies which improve the team and car’s performance. We are a cross-functional group, bringing together data science, machine learning, software engineering, and DevOps to deliver performance focused platforms and solutions. In reliability engineering, you will understand issue tracking and management, root cause analysis, integrating with other systems through API’s, and will have experience in building complex user interfaces that can present and manage large amounts of data.

As a Senior Specialist Software Engineer, your role will combine elements of technical leadership, agile/lean project delivery, and stakeholder management. You’ll be involved in all stages of the development life cycle from initial analysis through deployment, monitoring, and support. You will own systems architecture for the software you deliver, integrating with the wider McLaren F1 racing platform, and will balance the requirements of reliability engineering with the big picture in Racing to build a cohesive application estate.

The role will be primarily based at the McLaren Technology Centre with a proportion of the time spent working from home.

Principal Accountabilities:

• Partner with Product Management to capture and understand project requirements, define specifications, and to architect robust, scalable, and testable software solutions for reliability tools.

• Own the technical roadmap for Engineering tools, ensuring that you deliver on the priorities of the wider Engineering group. Planning up to a year in advance, you’ll iteratively deliver against the backlog of features that are most important to the team.

• Deliver Engineering tools using agile methodologies and built on the McLaren F1 software platform, in partnership and collaboration with the wider Software Engineering team.

• Operate and support the software that you build on race days, which may include limited on-call to resolve mission critical issues.

• Support the prioritisation and resource requirements of projects across Engineering.

Knowledge, Skills and Experience:

Essential

• Bsc in Computer Science or equivalent discipline (2:1 or above) or equivalent industry experience.

• Extensive commercial experience delivering projects using agile/lean methodologies.

• A strong full stack software development background with an understanding of how to engineer quality software.

• Considerable commercial development experience with C#/.net, Java, Python, or other development languages.

• Web development experience using technologies such as JavaScript, TypeScript, and React.

• Proven experience delivering mission critical software into a demanding production environment.

• Deep experience using git in a collaborative environment (pull requests, branches).

• Experience with relational and document databases e.g. SQL Server and MongoDB.

• Experience designing distributed microservice based architectures.

• Experience building maintainable codebases using design patterns and modern source control approaches.

• Using planning tools such as Jira, Github, or Azure DevOps to organise and track your work.

• High competency in written and oral English language.

Desirable

• Experience with issue and fault management systems.

• Knowledge and experience of how to integrate with and build OpenAPI/gRPC based systems.

• Experience building sophisticated plots/charting (Plotly, Matplotlib) and reporting systems (PowerBI).

• Experience of failure prediction/MTBF analysis.

• Experience with Manufacturing Resource Planning systems.

• Experience developing systems with Kafka and stream processing techniques.

• Experience with Linux and running containers on Kubernetes.

• Experience with cloud technologies e.g. Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud.
  

Personal Attributes:

• Self-motivated with high levels of initiative.

• Highly productive with the aptitude to understand and apply technology.

• You enjoy working with people to solve problems, choosing the simplest and most elegant approach then iterating.

• You're flexible and adaptable, detail orientated, and get satisfaction from delivering to a high standard.

• Able to work autonomously under pressure and to tight deadlines.

• You recognise the importance of continuous learning and sharing that knowledge with others.

• Approachable, with balanced judgment and a high level of personal integrity.

What can McLaren offer?

We constantly strive to be better tomorrow than we are today. Our ambition is to be the most pioneering and exhilarating racing team in the world, and our collective task is to set the standards for high performance in sport. We show up every day with energy and enthusiasm, ready to play our part.

We encourage and support diversity, equity and inclusion. We will actively promote a culture that values difference and eliminates discrimination in our workplace.

McLaren Racing is based at the iconic McLaren Technology Centre (MTC) near Woking. Here at McLaren, we offer hybrid working with 3 days a week based in the MTC.

Our state of the art, sustainable campus offers many facilities including a gym, restaurant and indoor and outdoor break-out areas, as well as direct access to park and common land. The MTC is connected to Woking mainline station via regular shuttle buses, from which London Waterloo is a 30 minute train ride.

We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including private healthcare, car schemes, life insurance and generous pension contributions.