Contract Technical Delivery Lead - MyGK Platform Why This Role Exists We are building MyGK, a new customer learning and booking platform with a three-phase strategy: Unify, Extend, Transform. MyGK will unify fragmented customer journeys and legacy booking capabilities, extend through secure integrations and multi-country delivery, and transform how customers manage their learning experience. The immediate priority is to turn a pre-MVP 0-to-1 platform into a reliable, production-ready service at pace. Humans do the work. Technology carries the weight. We are in the final stages of a 0-to-1 platform build and need to accelerate delivery within weeks, not months. The platform is being developed by a small in-house team of junior engineers in India, supported by a part-time senior engineer. There is no dedicated Product Owner: the successful contractor will take clear high-level direction from the platform sponsor, turn it into an executable delivery plan, make sound day-to-day technical decisions, and ship working increments quickly. This is not a role for someone who needs a lengthy discovery phase, a fully formed backlog, or a large delivery team around them. It is a hands-on technical delivery role for an experienced contractor who can get productive rapidly, raise the engineering bar through the work, and bring junior engineers with them. The Assignment You will lead the final delivery phase of MyGK: a React and Node.js customer platform for course discovery, learner administration, enrolment and integrations. You will own the path from high-level priorities to tested, deployable outcomes, working directly with the platform sponsor and a distributed engineering team. You will balance delivery leadership with hands-on engineering. You will clarify the minimum decision needed to move forward, break work into small deliverable slices, implement the difficult parts yourself, review and unblock the team, and keep quality high without creating unnecessary process. What You Will Deliver Rapidly assess the current codebase, environments and delivery risks, then establish a practical, prioritised plan for the next two to six weeks. Turn sponsor direction into a lightweight, ordered backlog with clear acceptance criteria, technical approach, ownership and release sequencing. Deliver and complete critical platform capabilities across the web application, APIs, data layer and integrations. Lead the integration of MyGK with the existing booking platform through secure REST APIs, without coupling MyGK directly to BAPS databases or internal systems. Complete the BAPS-to-MyGK synchronisation path, including change-tracking delta feeds, reliable watermark handling, idempotent writes and operational recovery. Drive the learner and administrator experience to a usable, coherent release standard, including course catalogue, enrolment, learning records and access-management workflows as prioritised. Make release readiness visible: working automated tests, meaningful health checks and logs, deployment checks, rollback awareness and a clear list of residual risks. Pair with, review the work of and coach junior engineers. Leave the team able to maintain and extend what is delivered, rather than dependent on the contractor. Provide concise, frequent status updates that distinguish completed work, current risks, decisions required and the next smallest shippable outcome. Technical Environment The successful contractor must be comfortable operating across this stack: React frontend, with modern JavaScript and a component/test-driven approach. Node.js backend services, REST API design, authentication and API integration patterns. Azure: Container Apps, Azure SQL, Key Vault, Container Registry, API Management, Application Gateway/Front Door, Azure Monitor and managed identities. Microsoft Entra External ID / OAuth and JWT-based API security. SQL and PostgreSQL and relational data modelling, including migration-driven schema changes, query performance and transactional consistency. GitHub-based CI/CD, Docker containers, automated unit/integration testing and practical production troubleshooting. Integration with a legacy Microsoft SQL Server/SOAP booking estate through the new REST API boundary. The platform is multi-country by design. It uses email as the canonical user identifier, GUID profile IDs and a separate contact-mapping layer. The contractor must respect those boundaries and make pragmatic delivery choices that preserve them. What Good Looks Like Within the first few days, you will understand the critical paths, identify the real blockers and agree a short, credible delivery sequence with the sponsor and team. Within the first two weeks, the team will be delivering in smaller, demonstrable increments with clear owners, reviews and release criteria. Critical risks around BAPS integration, data synchronisation, security and deployment will have an explicit owner and path to resolution. By the end of the engagement, priority customer and operational journeys will be working end-to-end in production; the junior team will have stronger habits for planning, testing, reviews and releases; and there will be clear technical documentation and a manageable forward backlog. Contract Profile Senior independent contractor available to start quickly and commit meaningful hands-on time during the initial delivery window. Comfortable working directly with a senior sponsor in place of a conventional Product Owner, converting outcomes into actionable work without waiting for perfect requirements. Comfortable leading an India-based junior engineering team across time zones, with overlapping working hours for decisions, pairing and unblockers. Delivery-focused: measures progress through working, tested, deployable software rather than meetings, documents or activity. How We Will Assess Candidates We will look for specific examples of candidates who have joined a partially built platform, established control of delivery quickly and shipped a material outcome with a small or mixed-experience team. Candidates should be ready to explain how they assess an unfamiliar codebase, sequence risk, work with incomplete requirements, mentor engineers while delivering, and decide what must be complete before a production release. The engagement will begin with a short, outcome-led assessment and delivery plan, followed immediately by hands-on implementation against the agreed priorities. Requirements Experience We Need Extensive hands-on experience delivering web platforms from early build through production release, ideally in a contractor, technical lead or player-coach capacity. Strong React and Node.js engineering experience, including designing and delivering secure REST APIs. Demonstrable Azure delivery experience, especially containerised applications, Azure SQL, managed identity, API gateways, application security and CI/CD. Experience integrating modern services with legacy enterprise systems and handling unreliable or evolving external dependencies safely. Strong relational database and data-integration experience; change data capture, incremental synchronisation or event/data pipeline experience is highly valuable. A record of working effectively with junior or distributed engineering teams: setting direction, pairing, reviewing, explaining trade-offs and improving capability while delivering. Sound engineering judgement: able to choose an appropriately simple solution, surface risks early and avoid both gold-plating and fragile shortcuts. Clear, direct written and spoken communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders. Nice To Have Experience with Microsoft Entra External ID, Azure API Management and private Azure networking. Experience in learning, bookings, subscriptions, ecommerce or other transaction-heavy customer platforms. Experience modernising or wrapping SOAP/SQL Server estates behind REST APIs. Experience setting up lean delivery practices for small teams under a fixed, near-term deadline.

Technical Delivery Lead - Contract

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