Lead Developer - Integrations - IT services - 107633 - Grade 8

Position Details

IT Services

Location: University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham UK

Full time starting salary is normally in the range £47,389 to £56,535 with potential progression once in post to £63,606

Grade: 8

Full Time, Permanent

Closing date: 24th August 2026

Our offer to you

People are at the heart of what we are and do.

The University of Birmingham is proud to have been a part of the City of Birmingham and the wider region for over 100 years, and we are equally proud to be recognised as a leading global university. We want to attract talented people from across the city and beyond, support them to succeed, and celebrate their success.

We are committed to helping the people who work here to develop through our sector-leading Birmingham Professional programme which provides all professional services staff with development opportunities and the encouragement to reach their full potential. With almost 5,000 professional services jobs in a wide-range of functions in Edgbaston and in our campus in Dubai, there are plenty of opportunities for you to be able to develop your career at the University.

We believe there is no such thing as a typical member of staff and that diversity is a source of strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation, and debate. We warmly welcome people from all backgrounds and are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where diversity is at the heart of who and what we are, and how we work.

Supporting our people to achieve a healthy work/life balance is important both to our employees and to the success of the University and, depending on the role, we offer a variety of flexible working arrangements. We therefore welcome discussions on all forms of flexible working. In addition, you will receive a generous package of benefits including 40 days paid holiday a year, one paid day a year for volunteering, occupational sick pay, and a pension scheme. We also have three high quality subsidised day nurseries.

The University is situated in leafy Edgbaston and there are excellent transport links to our beautiful campus, including main bus routes and a train station on site. On campus we have a state-of-the-art sports centre with pool, shops, places to eat and drink, our own art gallery, museum and botanical gardens.

Find out more about the benefits of working for the University of Birmingham

Background

Department overview

Over the next decade, our aspiration is to establish Birmingham in the top 50 of the world's leading universities. That's a pretty big aspiration, and high-quality digital services and infrastructure are crucial to achieving it. In recognition of that, a brand-new Digital Strategy combined with significant investments in technology mean this is an exciting time to join IT Services, ‘making IT happen’ at the University of Birmingham.

We want to attract outstanding, inspirational, and talented people, support them to succeed, and celebrate their success. It's our role to ensure that our community has access to accessible, responsive, resilient, and secure systems and support. What we do enables our students, staff, researchers, visitors and partners to confidently and creatively use digital services, technology and data for the benefit of their learning, teaching, research or work.

The culture of IT Services is one of innovation, collaboration, excellence, and inclusivity, and we apply the principles of customer focus and continuous improvement to everything we do. We have an active People and Culture network, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Women in IT group, bi-annual making IT happen awards recognition programme, and a superb Social Committee which arranges regular activities and events.

Role Summary

The primary responsibility of the Lead Developer (Integration and Systems) is to deliver quality software solutions on time and to budget that meet the needs of the organisation and to provide third line support for those solutions once they are live.

Main Duties

Solutions architecture

Leads the development of system integration and internal bespoke solution architectures for complex systems, ensuring consistency with specified requirements agreed with both external, and internal customers and the Business Analyst.

Takes full responsibility for the balance between functional, service quality and systems management requirements within a project.

Establishes policy and strategy for the selection of systems architecture components, and co-ordinates design activities, promoting the discipline to ensure consistency.

Ensures that appropriate standards (corporate, industry, national and international) are adhered to.

Within a business change programme, manages the target design, policies and standards, working proactively to maintain a stable, viable architecture and ensure consistency of design across projects within the programme.

Systems development management

Defines solution development projects which support the organisation's objectives and plans.

Ensures that senior management is both aware of and able to provide the required resources.

Contributes effectively to improving solution development processes within the organisation justified by measurable business benefits.

Facilitates availability and optimum utilisation of resources, especially in Agile projects.

Monitors and reports on the progress of development projects, ensuring that projects are carried out in accordance with agreed standards, methods and procedures (including secure software development).

Applies secure development improvement practices.

Systems design

Specifies and designs large or complex integration and systems software.

Selects appropriate software design standards, methods and tools, consistent with agreed enterprise and solution architectures and ensures they are applied effectively.

Reviews others' systems designs to ensure selection of appropriate technology, efficient use of resources, and integration of multiple systems and technology.

Contributes to policy for selection of architecture components.

Evaluates and undertakes impact analysis on major design options and assesses and manages associated risks.

Ensures that the system design balances functional, service quality, security and systems management requirements.

Systems integration

Designs and builds integration components and interfaces.

Leads practical integration work under the technical direction of the system/service designer.

May contribute to the overall design of the service.

May define the technical criteria for product/component selection.

Contributes to decisions about tools, methods and approaches.

Programming/software development

Sets local or team-based standards for programming tools and techniques, including security guidelines, and the selection of appropriate development methods.

Advises on application of standards and methods and ensures compliance.

Takes technical responsibility for all stages and/or iterations in a software development project, providing method specific technical advice and guidance to project stakeholders.

Assigns work packages, monitors performance and manages change control dynamically, to optimise productivity.

Provides advice, guidance and assistance to less experienced colleagues as required.

Testing

Accepts responsibility for creation of test cases using own in-depth technical analysis of both functional and non-functional specifications (such as reliability, efficiency, usability, maintainability and portability).

Creates traceability records, from test cases back to requirements.

Produces test scripts, materials and regression test packs to test new and amended software or services.

Specifies requirements for environment, data, resources and tools.

Interprets, executes and documents complex test scripts using agreed methods and standards.

Records and analyses actions and results, and maintains a defect register.

Reviews test results and modifies tests if necessary.

Provides reports on progress, anomalies, risks and issues associated with the overall project.

Reports on system quality and collects metrics on test cases.

Provides specialist advice to support others.

Software release and deployment

Assesses and analyses release components.

Provides input to scheduling.

Carries out the builds and tests in coordination with testers and component specialists maintaining and administering the tools and methods – manual or automatic - and ensuring, where possible, information exchange with configuration management.

Ensures release processes and procedures are maintained.

Porting/software configuration

When required leads a team, providing expert technical knowledge in the systems testing of platform-specific versions of the software products, on varying platforms.

Provides specialist guidance information to support, systems testing and quality assurance functions to assist in improving procedures.

Technical specialism

Provides leadership and guidelines to promote the development and exploitation of the following applications and technologies in the organisation and therefore must have up to date knowledge and skills, as well as being a highly competent developer in one or more of the following technologies.

.NET Development

Azure Integration Services

Will provide software development and third line support which includes user requirements gathering, design, development, unit testing and deployment in one or more of the following areas:

System Integration

Data interfaces

Systems integration and development methods and tools

Provides expertise and support on use of methods and tools.

Emerging technology monitoring

Maintains awareness of opportunities provided by new technology to address challenges or to enable new ways of working.

Within own sphere of influence, works to further organisational goals, by the study and use of emerging technologies and products.

Contributes to briefings and presentations about their relevance and potential value to the organisation.

Technology leadership and innovation

Provides organisational leadership and guidelines to promote the development and exploitation of system integration in the organisation.

Recognises potential strategic application of integration and system development capabilities.

Initiates and manages investigation and development of innovative methods, practices and technology, to the benefit of the organisation.

Plays an active and dynamic role in improving the interface between all interested parties, facilitating knowledge flow to enable sharing and development of creative ideas.

Supplier management and sourcing

Reviews business cases (requirements, potential benefits and options) and determines appropriate procurement routes. e.g., open market or collaborative framework.

Using market knowledge to inform specifications ensures detailed pre-qualification questionnaires and tender invitations are prepared.

Collects and collates data to support collaboration and negotiates terms and conditions to reflect the scale of requirements and encourage good performance.

Evaluates tenders based on specification and evaluation criteria, prepares acceptance documentation and advises on contracts and service level agreements.

Monitors and reports on supplier performance, information security, customer satisfaction, and market intelligence.

Investigates, resolves or escalates problems.

Implements supplier service improvement actions and programmes.

Contract management

Sources and collects contract performance data (such as pricing and supply chain costs), and monitors performance against KPIs.

Identifies and reports under-performance and develops opportunities for improvement.

Monitors compliance with Terms and Conditions and take appropriate steps to address non-compliance.

Pro-actively manages risk and reward mechanisms in the contract.

Monitors progress against business objectives specified in the business case.

Identifies where change is required, and plans for variations.

In consultation with stakeholders, ensures that change management protocols are implemented.

Relationship and stakeholder management

Implements stakeholder engagement/communications plans, including, for example; handling of complaints; problems and issues; managing resolutions; corrective actions and lessons learned; collection and dissemination of relevant information.

Uses feedback from customers and stakeholders to help measure effectiveness of stakeholder management.

Helps develop and enhance customer and stakeholder relationships.

Risk and sustainability management

Investigates and reports on hazards and potential risk events within the Integration and System Development function.

Assesses and reports on how different tactical decisions affect organisational sustainability.

Evaluates factors and risks (political, legislative, technological, economic, social) that impact on operational processes and strategic direction.

Project management

When required defines, documents and carries out small projects or sub-projects (typically less than six months, with limited budget, limited interdependency with other projects, and no significant strategic impact), alone or with a small team, actively participating in all phases.

Identifies, assesses and manages risks to the success of the project.

Agrees project approach with stakeholders, and prepares realistic plans (including quality, risk and communications plans) and tracks activities against the project schedule, managing stakeholder involvement as appropriate.

Monitors costs, timescales and resources used, and takes action where these deviate from agreed tolerances.

Ensures that own projects are formally closed and, where appropriate, subsequently reviewed, and that lessons learned are recorded.

Actively manages equality, diversity and inclusion through monitoring and evaluation and actively challenging unacceptable behaviour.

Supports the University’s sustainability agenda through resource efficient working.

Any other duties commensurate with the grade.

Required Knowledge, Skills, Qualifications, Experience

Educated to degree level or equivalent qualification plus substantial work experience in a relevant technical/scientific and/or management/supervisory role in a specialist area. A higher degree may also be held. Where no equivalent qualification is held a proven track record of extensive and substantial work experience in a series of progressively more demanding and relevant roles will be required.

Proven technical specialist knowledge and understanding in a relevant technical area (specialists will require advanced technical expertise).

Meaningful and relevant experience of integration development using the following Azure services:

Logic Apps,

Service Bus,

API Management,

Event Grid,

Azure Functions, and

Azure Data Factory

Experience of C# development.

Experience using Git and GitHub.

Experience of using Terraform.

Experience writing and applying automated tests.

Experience creating and maintain Continuous Deployment/Continuous Integration pipelines using GitHub actions.

Experience of developing databases and stored procedures on Microsoft SQL Server.

Must be able to effectively communicate with user/customer areas to understand their requirements and then deliver them.

Must have good supervisory and coaching skills to manage, motivate and develop staff.

Must be able to provide advice to others and often required to persuade them to follow a particular course of action.

Must have strong people and project management skills where needed.

Proven analytical and problem solving skills with sufficient technical skill and knowledge to be able to act as a mentor and coach.

Must have strong software and solution development experience with a proven record of delivering and supporting complex integration and software solutions in medium to large organisations, on time and to budget.

Experience of delivery methodologies such as Kanban, Scrum and other agile approaches.

Evidence of literacy and numeracy.

Experience of championing Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in own work area.

Ability to monitor and evaluate the extent to which equality and diversity legislation, policies, procedures are applied.

Ability to identify issues with the potential to impact on protected groups and take appropriate action.

Informal enquiries to Carl Finikin, email: c.b.finikin@bham.ac.uk

View our staff values and behaviours here

Use of AI in applications: We want to understand your genuine interest in the role and for the written elements of your application to accurately reflect your own communication style. Applications that rely too heavily on AI tools can appear generic and lack the detail we need to assess your skills and experience. Such applications will unlikely be progressed to interview.

We believe there is no such thing as a 'typical' member of University of Birmingham staff and that diversity in its many forms is a strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation and debate at the heart of University life. We are committed to proactively addressing the barriers experienced by some groups in our community and are proud to hold Athena SWAN, Race Equality Charter and Disability Confident accreditations. We have an Equality Diversity and Inclusion Centre that focuses on continuously improving the University as a fair and inclusive place to work where everyone has the opportunity to succeed. We are also committed to sustainability, which is a key part of our strategy. You can find out more about our work to create a fairer university for everyone on our website .