Senior Technical Manager

Senior Technical Manager -

Full-Stack Development & IT Operations

10+ years of experience required | London/Hybrid

About the Role

Join our team as the Senior Technical Manager working across development, AI integration, architecture, and IT operations for a group of specialist loss registration companies including The Art Loss Register, The Watch Register, The Equipment Register, and The Classic Car Register.

You'll build and maintain specialised web applications and customer services that help recover stolen and lost property, working closely with auction houses, dealers, law enforcement and international markets.

Working directly with the Director of I.T., you'll help manage a small development team, architect technical solutions, drive AI integration initiatives, maintain production systems, and oversee office IT infrastructure across our companies.

This role includes occasional travel to our Delhi (India) and Westbury (UK) offices. With regular visits and call-outs to our main London (UK) office.

Core Technical Skill Requirements

Application Backend

• PHP 8.x & Symfony Framework - Modern MVC architecture, service container, dependency injection
• Doctrine ORM - Complex entity relationships and query optimisation
• WordPress - Custom plugin/theme development for customer-facing services
• MySQL/PostgreSQL/MS SQL Server - Advanced SQL, performance tuning, migrations

Application Frontend

• Modern JavaScript (ES6+) - Async/await, promises
• Stimulus JS & Turbo (Hotwired) - Lightweight reactive interfaces
• Webpack 5 & Sass/SCSS - Asset compilation and preprocessing
• Bootstrap & responsive design

DevOps & Infrastructure

• Docker & Kubernetes - Container orchestration, Helm charts, deployments
• Cloud Platforms - Kubernetes on multiple providers, AWS (S3, SES)
• CI/CD - GitHub action pipelines, automated testing and deployment

AI & Innovation

• Symfony AI - Custom AI model integration and agent development
• Problem-solving - Architecting solutions for complex technical challenges
• Technical strategy - Evaluating and implementing emerging technologies

Office IT & Systems

• Networking - Physical office network management, WiFi, TCP/IP, DNS, SolarWinds/Cisco, VPN configuration
• Microsoft 365 - Administration, user management, security policies
• Office Infrastructure - General IT support and system maintenance

Architecture & Patterns

• Message Queuing - Symfony Messenger, RabbitMQ for asynchronous processing
• Caching - Valkey for performance optimization
• RESTful APIs - Design and integration
• Security - Authentication, RBAC, 2FA implementation, ISO 27001 and other security compliances

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Management - Collaborate with Director of I.T. on architecture and technical direction
• Developer Management - Co-manage and mentor a small development team
• Innovation - Research and implement AI solutions and emerging technologies
• Solution Architecture - Design approaches to complex technical challenges
• Operations - Maintain production systems and respond to outages
• IT Management - Oversee office IT infrastructure and Microsoft 365 environment
• Collaboration - Occasional travel to Delhi office for team coordination

What Makes This Role Unique

You'll work on domain-specific search algorithms for art, watches, equipment, and vehicles, complex multi-criteria scoring systems, custom AI models, and case management workflows that directly support recovery operations and law enforcement.

This is a rare opportunity to combine hands-on development with technical management and meaningful impact across multiple industry-leading registration services.

Bonus: Experience of database management, and multi-application infrastructure is highly valued.