Technical Architect

AlphaPlus is a Manchester-based education service business specialising in standards, assessment and certification. We help our clients design, develop, deploy and evaluate qualifications and their underpinning assessments. Our work spans the public and private sectors, schools, colleges, vocational and professional learning and includes work across the UK’s four nations, and international projects.

AlphaPlus is project based – we deliver more than 50 projects per year for clients. This means our work is varied (no two projects are ever the same), and all our staff work across multiple projects.

Although AlphaPlus uses technology extensively in its day-to-day operations, and advises clients on technology, historically it has not sold technology directly to clients. This is changing, as is the need for AlphaPlus to select and integrate commercially available technology solutions, which includes some development work.

AlphaPlus’ senior team have strong technology backgrounds. Although we work in a traditional and risk-averse sector (exams) we are having considerable success in modernisation projects based on implementing effective technology for our clients.

Current technology work in AlphaPlus includes:

• Development of an in-house web-based platform to support question and test authoring and review across large teams of authors/reviewers. The system has an Angular front-end and a Java back-end;
• Planned integration with the TAO e-assessment platform (TAO is written in PHP but has a REST API);
• Development / integration of charts for a data analysis engine. The engine will be written in R by our data analysts, but we plan to develop charting for customer dashboards;
• Customisation / integration of software platforms / tools for specific projects.

There is now a genuine career opportunity for an individual who can:

• work with AlphaPlus staff and clients to understand core business and project specific technology requirements;
• scope and design solutions;
• write software to integrate / customise / develop these solutions;
• work with other AlphaPlus staff and our subcontractors to implement and productionise these solutions (sometimes at scale).

We are looking for a technologist with an entrepreneurial client-focused outlook to help grow our technical capability. The postholder must be a self-starter with a solid technology background, and experience of developing software. They will support and be line-managed by the director responsible for technology. They will report directly to the board on key strategic technology developments. As technology plays an ever more important role within AlphaPlus, and the business itself continues to grow, the successful applicant will have an opportunity to grow their role accordingly. Formal training in software development, such as a computer science degree, is desirable but not essential.

To apply please use the link to the AlphaPlus jobs page, and follow the application instructions published there.

AlphaPlus reserves the right to close the vacancy immediately on filling the role.

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