Senior Analyst/Developer (Front & Back-End)

Job Description:

Senior Analyst/Developer (Front & Back-End)

6 Months FTC - £47,389 – £56,535 per annum (depending on experience) + Holiday Pay + Benefits + Hybrid (on-campus and remote working available)

To provide technical leadership for the enhancement of and operational support of the University’s core Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) Moodle, Lecture Capture System (Echo360) and complementary learning, teaching and assessment solutions (e.g. Mahara ePortfolio, digital assessment tools, etc.). The role holder will provide technical expertise in the development, integration and support of these platforms, troubleshooting issues and applying relevant fixes, creating new features and working with internal stakeholders and external vendors to optimise, provide a coherent and robust service across the University. This role is a highly independent but collaborative one, building on existing relationships with a variety of key stakeholder departments and it expected that it will bring their own voice to the table and contributing ideas to the products and produce clean, scalable and well-documented code whilst providing outstanding customer service. It is expected that the role holder will be flexible and adaptable to working with and learning any new platforms and systems that may become part of the portfolio of applications supported by the department.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Development & Support

• Responding to escalated ServiceNow calls and JIRA bugs with professionalism and timeliness by providing expert advice/operational support to users of the University’s core VLE service (Moodle), Echo360 lecture capture system and complementary digital learning technologies in order for them to utilise systems to their full potential.
• Play a hands-on role as part of a small, specialist team to design, develop, test and maintain high quality web applications and backend/frontend services that fulfil business needs.
• Working collaboratively to design, develop and test solutions.
• Write documentation of new processes and products to facilitate knowledge sharing.
• Strong focus on quality. Define and execute practices such as continuous integration and test-driven development to enable the rapid delivery of working software.
• Communicating positively with users / customers, avoiding technical jargon.
• Solving technically complex challenges.
• Applying expertise to issues, implementing clean fixes
• Responsible for ensuring confidentiality, integrity and availability for data. Following information security and data management policies ensuring, least privilege and information assurance
• Ensuring appropriate levels of business continuity are factored into solutions and maintained during the solutions lifecycle
• Monitoring of systems and reacting to alerts and abnormal behaviour
• Liaison and escalation with internal developers and 3rd party vendors

Improving IT output

• Apply modern development practices (Agile, CI/CD, TDD, version control).
• Identify recurring issues and deliver root-cause improvements.
• Produce and maintain clear technical and user documentation.
• Contribute to skills development and continuous service improvement.

Projects & Change

• Provide technical leadership on medium and large projects.
• Identify risks, escalate issues, and propose effective solutions.
• Support change management and contribute to well-defined services within the service catalogue.

Person Specification

• Degree-level education or equivalent professional experience.
• Strong technical expertise in Moodle (including plugin development and integrations) and Echo360, with experience of related digital learning tools.
• Solid knowledge of Linux command-line tools and system administration.
• Experience using modern development practices, including Agile, version control, CI/CD, test-driven development, and change control.
• Proven experience with PHP, JavaScript, CSS, NodeJS, and jQuery (Python desirable).
• Experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs.

Desirable Criteria

• PRINCE2 Foundation, ITIL4 Foundation, or equivalent qualifications.
• Experience working within a Higher Education environment.
• Working knowledge of Azure or other cloud platforms.
• Active involvement in the Moodle or wider e-learning community.