Senior Moodle Technical Lead

Development, Upgrades & AI Innovation

About the Role

We are seeking a highly capable, hands-on Moodle Technical Lead to take ownership of our Moodle learning management system and lead an existing team of three Moodle developers. Moodle is a business-critical platform for our Registered Training Organisation (RTO), supporting student learning, assessments and day-to-day training operations.

Our current production environment is Moodle 3.8, and the development team has been working on a major upgrade to Moodle 5.x. The successful candidate will independently review the existing environment and migration work, establish a clear delivery plan, lead the team through a safe production upgrade, and then drive ongoing improvements to the student and trainer experience.

This is not a purely managerial role. We need a senior technical person who is hands-on and can personally inspect code, diagnose difficult problems, review architecture, write and review PHP/Moodle code, guide other developers and take responsibility for getting projects completed. This role does not have a work-from-home option. The role is based in the Pune office.

The Initial Mission

- Audit the existing Moodle 3.8 production system, the Moodle 5.x development environment, custom code, plugins, integrations, database changes and infrastructure.
- Determine exactly what remains before the upgraded Moodle can safely go live and produce a realistic, measurable delivery plan.
- Complete and stabilise the Moodle upgrade without losing critical existing functionality.
- Reduce technical debt and move inappropriate Moodle core customisations into maintainable plugins or supported extension points where practical.
- Introduce stronger development processes including source control, code review, staging, testing, documentation, release procedures and rollback planning.
- Create clear ownership, deadlines and accountability for work allocated to the existing Moodle development team.

Key Responsibilities

- Lead, mentor and coordinate the existing team of three Moodle developers.
- Remain hands-on with Moodle/PHP development, troubleshooting and code review.
- Own the Moodle technical roadmap, upgrade program and production release process.
- Review custom plugins, themes, integrations and any modifications to Moodle core.
- Identify obsolete or unnecessary customisations and simplify the platform where possible.
- Maintain secure and reliable development, staging and production environments.
- Establish Git branching, peer review and deployment standards.
- Improve monitoring, backup, recovery, documentation and business-continuity processes.
- Work directly with our management to translate operational and training requirements into practical technical solutions.
- Design improvements to the student and trainer experience rather than simply maintaining the existing system.
- Investigate and implement appropriate AI features, including AI-assisted assessment and feedback workflows.
- Manage third-party integrations and APIs where required.
- Provide concise weekly progress reporting covering completed work, current work, blockers, deadlines and risks.

Innovation & AI After the upgrade is under control, a major part of this role will be improving our LMS rather than simply maintaining it. We want someone who actively identifies opportunities to make Moodle faster, easier to use and more effective for students, trainers and administration staff.

- AI-assisted marking of written responses.
- AI analysis of student-uploaded images against benchmark evidence and assessment criteria, with a suggested grade and feedback for trainer approval.
- Improved competency-based assessment workflows.
- Better trainer dashboards and assessment queues.
- Student progress and engagement monitoring.
- Automation of repetitive administrative and assessment tasks.
- Improved integrations between Moodle and other business systems.

Example AI Project A student uploads an image as assessment evidence. Moodle sends the student's image, benchmark image and assessment rubric to an AI vision model. The AI returns a suggested mark/competency outcome, criterion-by-criterion findings and proposed feedback. The trainer reviews, edits or accepts the recommendation before anything is released to the student. The solution must be maintainable and should avoid unnecessary Moodle core modifications.

Essential Technical Skills

- Strong professional Moodle development experience, including custom plugin development.
- Demonstrated experience upgrading heavily customised Moodle environments across major versions.
- Strong PHP and object-oriented programming skills.
- Strong understanding of Moodle APIs, architecture, events, tasks, permissions, question/assessment systems and plugin structure.
- MySQL or MariaDB and database troubleshooting/optimisation.
- Git and professional source-control workflows.
- Linux server environments and web-server troubleshooting.
- HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
- REST APIs, web services and third-party integrations.
- Experience with staging, testing, deployment and rollback processes.
- Ability to diagnose legacy code and determine whether it should be migrated, refactored or removed.
- Ability to review other developers' work and enforce appropriate coding and documentation standards.

Highly Desirable

- Experience with Moodle 4.x/5.x and recent Moodle architecture.




- Experience with Moodle's AI subsystem and/or integration with OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic or other AI APIs.
- Experience with automated testing and CI/CD.
- DevOps/cloud infrastructure experience.
- Experience with learning, assessment, education or training platforms.
- Experience leading an offshore or distributed software-development team.

Leadership & Personal Attributes

- Strong ownership mentality - follows work through to completion rather than simply reporting blockers.
- High integrity and reliability.
- Strong work ethic and personal accountability.
- Comfortable challenging existing technical decisions when there is a better solution.
- Able to explain complex technical matters to non-technical management in plain English.
- Organised and capable of turning large projects into measurable tasks, owners and deadlines.
- Curious and innovative; actively proposes improvements instead of waiting for instructions.
- Calm and methodical when dealing with production incidents and business-critical systems.

Business Systems Integration & Process Improvement The role extends beyond Moodle development. The Technical Lead will work with management, administration staff and trainers to improve end-to-end business processes across Moodle, Zoho and VETtrak, with a focus on reducing duplicate data entry, manual handling, errors and audit risk.

- Review existing Moodle, Zoho and VETtrak workflows and identify opportunities for reliable integration and automation.
- Design and implement API-based integrations, scheduled synchronisation and workflow automation where appropriate.
- Improve enrolment, student record, assessment, communication, completion and administrative workflows while maintaining clear system-of-record ownership.
- Reduce duplicate entry and introduce validation, exception reporting and reconciliation controls so data inconsistencies are detected early.
- Document integrations, data flows, field mappings, API credentials, dependencies, failure handling and recovery procedures.
- Work with relevant vendors/support teams where direct integration requires third-party APIs or product-specific expertise.
- Ensure new integrations are maintainable, testable and do not create unnecessary dependence on individual developers.

Staff Training & Continuous Improvement The Technical Lead will also be responsible for helping us obtain better value from the systems it already owns. This includes structured training and practical process improvement for trainers and administration staff.

- Conduct regular Moodle training sessions for trainers, assessors and administration staff.
- Teach staff how to use Moodle features correctly and efficiently, including activities, assessments, grading, reports, permissions, completion tracking and relevant automation tools.
- Create short internal guides, standard operating procedures and training resources for critical workflows.
- Observe how staff currently use Moodle and related systems, identify inefficient workarounds and recommend better processes.
- Introduce preventative controls, checklists, reports and alerts that help identify incomplete records, incorrect configurations or process failures before they become larger problems.
- Support audit readiness by improving traceability, consistency, documentation and evidence retention within system workflows.
- Run refresher training when major Moodle features, integrations or internal processes change.

System Ownership, Security & Access Governance Our management team requires clear organisational ownership of all business-critical systems. Dual contingency for access, to avoid any one developer or external contractor being the sole holder of privileged access, credentials, recovery methods or technical knowledge required to operate the LMS.

- Ensure our management retains organisation-controlled ownership and recovery access to Moodle, AWS/cloud infrastructure, domains, source-code repositories, databases, backups, API accounts and other critical services.
- Establish at least two controlled emergency/owner-level privileged accounts where technically appropriate, with credentials stored securely by authorised management rather than held solely by a developer.
- Review the current Moodle administrator structure and ensure the organisation has appropriate top-level administrative access independent of individual employees.
- Implement role-based access and least-privilege principles so developers, trainers, administrators and contractors receive only the access required for their duties.
- Maintain an auditable register of privileged accounts, service accounts, API keys and system owners, including an employee/contractor offboarding procedure.
- Use individual named accounts for routine administration rather than shared administrator credentials wherever possible.
- Implement multi-factor authentication, credential rotation, access logging and periodic privileged-access reviews where supported.
- Ensure production data access by developers is controlled, justified and logged,



with development/testing performed on sanitised or appropriately protected data wherever practical.
- Ensure backups and disaster-recovery procedures can be accessed and executed by authorised our management without dependence on a single developer.
- Document critical architecture, credentials ownership, deployment processes and recovery procedures so staff departures do not create operational lock-in.

New Moodle Environment & Controlled Launch As part of the new Moodle launch, we intend to establish a clean, organisation-controlled environment rather than simply carrying forward historical access arrangements. The Technical Lead will be expected to recommend and execute a safe migration architecture.

- Build the new production setting from a documented baseline on a new server/cloud environment where this is technically appropriate.
- Create infrastructure, root/owner, Moodle administrator and recovery access under organisation-controlled accounts from the beginning.
- Migrate only required application code, plugins, configuration and data after review, testing and backup validation.
- Ensure secrets and passwords are not embedded in source code and are managed through appropriate secure configuration/secret-management methods.
- Perform security, functional, integration, backup/restore and user-acceptance testing before cutover.
- Prepare a documented cutover and rollback plan to minimise disruption to students and staff.
- Hand over architecture documentation, credential ownership records, deployment instructions and disaster-recovery procedures to authorised management before project sign-off.

First 60 Days - Expected Outcomes

First 15 Days

- Complete an independent technical audit of production and development Moodle environments.
- Create an inventory of custom plugins, third-party plugins, core modifications, integrations and infrastructure dependencies.
- Identify upgrade blockers, technical debt, security/maintenance risks and unfinished migration work.
- Provide management with a written upgrade recommendation, priorities and realistic delivery milestones.
- Audit all privileged access to Moodle, AWS/cloud infrastructure, repositories, databases, backups and integrations, and identify any single-person dependencies.
- Recommend an organisation-controlled administrator, credential and recovery-access model for the new Moodle environment.
- Map current Moodle-Zoho-VETtrak data flows and identify the highest-value automation and audit-control opportunities.

Days 16- 30

- Establish clear development workflow, task ownership, code-review standards and reporting.
- Prioritise and commence resolution of upgrade blockers.
- Establish or improve staging, testing, deployment and rollback procedures.
- Begin documenting critical system knowledge currently held by individual developers.

Days 31 -60

- Demonstrate measurable progress against the agreed upgrade plan.
- Provide a reliable production-release path and remaining-work forecast.
- Demonstrate improved visibility and accountability across the development team.
- Present an initial roadmap for post-upgrade Moodle improvements and AI/automation projects.

What Success Looks Like Within the first year, we expects to have a supported, secure and maintainable Moodle platform; organisation-controlled privileged access and recovery capability; a documented codebase, integration architecture and deployment process; significantly reduced dependency on individual developers; improved Moodle-Zoho-VETtrak workflows; trained staff using Moodle consistently and effectively; stronger preventative controls for audit readiness; a development team operating against clear priorities and deadlines; and a roadmap of practical improvements that materially improve the experience of students, trainers and administrators.

Candidate Assessment

Shortlisted candidates should expect a practical technical assessment. This may include reviewing a sanitised section of an existing Moodle codebase or architecture, identifying upgrade and maintainability issues, and explaining how they would approach an AI-assisted assessment requirement. The purpose is to assess practical problem-solving and technical leadership, not only interview performance.

Suggested Naukri Screening Questions

1. How many years of hands-on Moodle development experience do you have?
2. Which Moodle versions have you personally upgraded, and what was the largest version jump?
3. Have you upgraded a Moodle installation containing custom plugins or Moodle core modifications? Briefly describe the project.
4. How many developers have you directly led or technically supervised?
5. Are you still hands-on with PHP/Moodle coding and code review?
6. Have you built Moodle plugins from scratch? Please list the plugin types you have worked with.
7. What experience do you have with Linux, MySQL/MariaDB, Git and production deployments?
8. Have you integrated Moodle with AI/LLM APIs or other external APIs? Please describe.
9. Are you willing to work full-time from our India office, particularly during the initial stabilisation and upgrade period?
10. What is your current CTC, expected CTC and notice period?

Application Please apply with your CV and a short summary of the most complex Moodle upgrade or custom-development project you have personally led. Include the Moodle versions involved, the approximate size of the development team, major technical challenges, your personal responsibilities and the final outcome.

📌 Senior Moodle Technical Lead (Pune)
🏢 Ausinet Pune
📍 Pune