Fullstack Job: Senior Fullstack Javascript Engineer

WHO ARE KFC?

Colonel Harland Sanders opened the first KFC in Corbin, Kentucky in 1938. He started with one restaurant, 11 herbs and spices, and an idea. From there our incredible brand and product grew to what it is today.

KFC first came to the UK in 1965 with our first restaurant in Preston, Lancashire. Today we are a billion-pound business with over 1000 restaurants run by our 28,000 restaurant team members. Our headquarters are based at the Restaurant Support Centre (RSC) in Woking, Surrey – a 24-minute train from Waterloo. Of the c.1000 restaurants in the UK, 95% are owned and operated by 34 franchise partners; the remaining 5% are company owned and run.

WHO ARE ‘YUM!’?

KFC is one of the 5 brands operated by our parent company Yum! along with Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, The Habit Burger Grill and recently added Heartstyles. We are the world’s largest restaurant group with over 52,000 restaurants across the globe.

Yum! isn’t your average Fortune 500 company. We like to do things a little differently. From our world-famous culture of fun and recognition to our focus on your career potential.

OUR CULTURE

BREAKTHROUGH RESULTS, TEAMWORK AND RECOGNITION

We believe that our success is driven by the power of our employees working in unison with a shared set of common goals and values. We are very proud that KFC UKI is recognised as a key market not only in terms of profit and innovation but also for the talent we grow and develop for Yum!.

We invest heavily in our people and helping them drive their personal development. As part of this we give each of our managers in the business the opportunity to go through Heartstyles. Heartstyles is a tool and strategy to measure and manage culture, building people’s self-awareness and helping them to transform their behaviours. This tool can then be used in coaching conversations you have with your team and line manager and to help build effective individual development plans.

We celebrate success every day and to us recognition is much more than just saying thank you- it is about really celebrating achievements, milestones and behaviours. One of the ways we do this is through our own personal recognition awards.

As a company we take our corporate social responsibility very seriously and encourage our employees to ‘give something back’ through companywide charity efforts.

As an equal opportunity employer, we embrace individuality and diversity. We employ irrespective of background, age, ethnicity, colour, gender, disability, sexual or religious orientation and marital status.

MORE ABOUT THE ROLE

Do you have a passion for application design with an analytical mind for programming?

As Senior Engineer you will work in an agile, cross discipline team that believes in customer focus, continuous delivery, and continuous improvement. Working within the teams you will help to shape our new and existing applications focusing on improving and creating better experiences and architecting future thinking platforms that can scale with the everchanging business needs.

KFC’s digital landscape is constantly evolving and as part of the Digital Technology team you will also be working to shape what’s next. You will partner with experts in marketing, operations and technology as well as some of the UK’s top agencies to help deliver exciting new digital projects and powerful new features.

Whilst we’re one of the world’s biggest and most loved brands, we’re still a small tech team of around 40 people (and growing!) so it’s a great environment to get exposure to lots of different projects. Everyone gets to contribute and collaborate so you should be comfortable discussing and challenging ideas with other QAs, Developers, Scrum Masters, DevOps Engineers and Designers.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Areas of Impact…

• Use your technical knowledge to help influence & steer the direction of projects whilst gaining insights and input from SME’s within the business.
• Be hands on with development teams, understand what great code looks like and see the bigger picture by taking into account architecture and a view of the DevOps mindset.
• Working in a cross-functional team of engineers, UX designers, Scrum masters, Testers and product owners to build intuitive applications
• Participating in conversations around technical design and trade-offs
• Helping to define and document best practices for platform and brand engineering teams, working with those teams to define preferred tools and technologies and then promoting their standard use throughout the organisation.
• Assist in the preparation and documentation of product requirements and specifications alongside the technical architects
• Contribute and co-run the engineering guild meetings, writing up the notes in confluence on key actions and decisions taken as part of the overall engineering team.
• Help drive the quality assurance of program logic, data processing, and error resolution from a code-level perspective as part of the Engineering guild
• Support alongside other engineers in the recruitment of other engineers including interviews, case studies and candidate testing
• Consistently write, translate, and code software functions, programs and applications according to specifications adhering to coding standards as created by the engineering guild.
• Run and monitor performance tests on new and existing software to correct mistakes, isolating areas for improvement and general debugging as well as making sure it fits the needs of the business both now and able to scale for the future.
• Administer diagnostic analysis of test results and deliver solutions to critical areas.
• Review existing code that has been developed previously, recording ways of continuous improvement, refactoring and areas of technical debt.

WHAT WE'D LOVE FROM YOU

EXPERIENCE

• Excellent knowledge of Web platforms, technologies, protocols, and publishing tools
• Hands-on experience with database integration and a range of both relational and non-relational database platforms,
• Strong knowledge of system and software quality assurance best practices and methodologies.
• Backend Engineer - Extensive knowledge of AWS especially around AWS Serverless technologies including but not limited to: SQS, Lambda, DynamoDB, Step functions, SNS, S3, X-Ray, Cloudwatch, Firehose and IAM.
• Working technical knowledge of some of the following:

• Frameworks, like Serverless, React Native & React
• Programming languages like Javascript
• Testing frameworks, including Detox and Jest
• Development platforms, including Node, iOS and Android

• Experience working with enterprise applications
• Hands-on experience working in integrated development environments
• Solid working knowledge of current Internet technologies
• Hands-on software troubleshooting experience.
• Understanding of event-driven software design
• Knowledge of DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines
• Backend Engineer - Working knowledge of IAC Cloudformation and Terraform
• Working collaboratively in a Scrum team environment & guilds, as well as being able to work independently, entrusted with some tasks at hand.

Coding Languages:

• AWS Serverless knowledge (cloudformation) including:

• Step functions
• Lambda
• SQS
• SNS
• DynamoDB

• Serverless Framework
• NodeJS
• React
• React Native

ABOUT YOU

We deliver together as a team so are highly collaborative, even when remote, so we’re looking for skills to help further foster this…

• Familiarity and use of Agile frameworks including Scrum & Kanban
• Team Player
• Proactive and not afraid to ask questions or for help when needed
• Good communication skills (especially verbal)
• Positive can-do attitude

WHAT WE CAN OFFER YOU

REWARD, PROGRESSION AND LOTS OF RECOGNITION

A career with KFC offers much more than just fantastic earning potential. We reward achievement with amazing incentives and benefits, including;

• Company and performance related bonus
• Generous pension with up to 11% company contribution
• Private healthcare with the option to increase to include family cover and extra dental cover
• Annual holiday allowance starts at 25 days with the option to buy or sell up to 3 extra days per year
• After 5 years’ service, annual holiday allowance increases to 30 days
• Study support may be available for job-related qualifications
• Competitive maternity leave and flexible return to work options
• International career opportunities across Yum!
• Pick n Mix Benefits, options include gym membership, health screening and travel insurance

KFC is also a very sociable company and we strive to incorporate our company value of fun whenever we can. Our teams regularly enjoy nights out with their colleagues- including pay day drinks, weekly netball and football matches and each year we organise a big Christmas party to celebrate the successes of the year.