The posting
Who We Are
WPP Enterprise Solutions designs, builds, and operates the growth systems that competitive businesses rely on. In a world where Al is reshaping how companies drive growth, we lead clients in business transformation and marketing modernization, connecting strategy directly to execution. Our 12,000 experts in engineering and platforms, commerce, consulting, content transformation, CRM, and CX work within a unified global operating unit across 40+ markets. WPP Enterprise Solutions works alongside best-in-class partners including Adobe, AWS, Braze, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Shopify, as well as innovators in AI, to deliver growth solutions tailored to the needs of our clients’ businesses. VML, part of WPP, supports WPP Enterprise Solutions by helping brands activate transformation through creativity and experience.
The opportunity
We're looking for a hands-on Senior Technical Lead to build a B2B eCommerce platform for a leading pharmaceutical brand, and to lead the engineers building it alongside you.
This is a coding role first. You'll spend most of your week in the codebase, setting the technical standard by writing the hardest parts yourself and reviewing everything else. You'll work to the architecture set by our Technical Architect and turn it into working software, leading a distributed engineering team and working alongside WPP's managed service team who run and support the platform in Liferay.
What you’ll be doing
- Write production code. Liferay customisation, backend services and integrations, with the complex and high-risk work landing on your keyboard
- Lead a distributed engineering team day to day, owning technical delivery through the sprint
- Run code review and set the quality bar in the codebase, through standards, testing and pairing rather than documents
- Break the architecture down into buildable work, and challenge the design where implementation reality says it won't hold
- Own the build and release pipeline, environments and branching strategy
- Debug and fix the problems nobody else can, across Liferay, integrations and infrastructure
- Make sure what you build can be run, monitored and supported by a managed service team at agreed service levels
- Support technical service transition, including runbooks, operational acceptance criteria and monitoring requirements
- Act as technical escalation for the managed service team on complex incidents and root cause analysis
- Own the technical debt backlog in the codebase and get remediation into the sprint, not just onto a list
- Work directly with product owners, QA and the client's technical team at working level, in refinement, demos and technical clarification
What we want from you
- Strong hands-on Java engineering. You're coding now and you want to stay that way
- Proven Liferay DXP development experience. OSGi modules, Service Builder or client extensions, headless and REST APIs, fragments and workflow
- Commerce experience, on Liferay Commerce or a comparable platform. Catalogues, pricing, channels, carts and order flow
- Solid integration engineering. REST, messaging, enterprise integration patterns and error handling in anger
- Confident with relational databases, query performance and data modelling
- Practical cloud experience, and CI/CD pipelines you've built and maintained yourself
- Experience leading engineers through code review, pairing and technical direction rather than line management
- Experience building solutions that are handed into, or run by, a managed service or application support team
- Observability, logging, monitoring and alerting treated as part of the build
- Clear written and spoken English, and technical documentation other engineers can actually use
- Comfortable in a distributed, multi-location team across UK and India
If you know some of this even better
- Liferay certification, or contribution to the Liferay community
- Experience delivering into validated or regulated environments. GxP, CSV or data residency
- Event-driven architecture and streaming platforms
- Caching strategies at scale, at Liferay and CDN layer
- Elasticsearch or OpenSearch tuning
- Prior experience of a blended change and run model
What we can offer you
Alongside the opportunity to work with some of the most exciting brands around the world, we’ll also prioritise your career development and help you grow your skills. We’ll empower you to make a difference, allow you to be yourself, and respect who you are.
Our culture thrives on our core values, designed for impact-driven individuals: Heart, Brains and Courage.
We lead with Heart, fostering empathy and trust where genuine connections and human-centric work flourish. We empower your Brains for innovation, valuing relentless curiosity and collaborative intelligence to solve complex challenges. And we champion Courage, inspiring you to speak up, embrace experimentation, and advocate for bold solutions that push our thinking to be better than yesterday.
About WPP
WPP is the trusted growth partner for the world’s leading brands. With exceptional talent, trusted data and intelligence and world-class partnerships – all united by our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open – we help clients navigate change, capture opportunity and deliver transformational growth. For more information, visit WPP.com.
WPP (VML/WPP Enterprise Solutions) is an equal opportunity employer and considers applicants for all positions without discrimination or regard to characteristics. We are committed to fostering a culture of respect in which everyone feels they belong and has the same opportunities to progress in their careers.
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