Engineering Manager/Director - Product Engineering
Element, United Kingdom
Job Description
Who we are
Element is the startup which employs the core team behind Matrix the leading project for secure, open decentralised communication.
Matrix’s mission is to make messaging as open as email allowing everyone to choose where their data is hosted, enjoy private conversations and ultimately be in control of their own communication.
Practically speaking this means building open, self-sovereign alternatives to WhatsApp/Slack/Teams for governments, civic institutions and communities. At one end of the scale, the French government has adopted Matrix for all of its instant messaging needs and more recently we delivered the world’s largest-ever single contract for a collaborative software service helping schools in Germany support remote learning. On the other end of the scale, open-source communities such as Mozilla have adopted Element for all of its community chat replacing IRC
The Role
Reporting to the Head of Engineering Management you will lead and provide engineering management support to Product Engineering teams at Element. Initially, you will be responsible for two cross-functional teams comprising a total of 8 engineers focusing on the product development of Element. The teams also include designers and product managers who report along functional lines.
More concretely you will:-
- Take responsibility for the overall effectiveness of product engineering delivery.
- Shape and communicate the technical strategy for your area.
- Partner with your peers in the Product and Design organisations to ensure strong alignment between your team’s goals and the broader company strategy.
- Ensure that your engineers are well supported to deliver on their goals, course-correcting where necessary.
- Facilitate technical design sessions, retrospectives, 1:1s etc.
- In order to understand the challenges the team faces you will be expected to contribute code. At the current team size, this would mean maybe 10-20% of your time acting as an individual contributor.
- Take responsibility for the ongoing professional development of your engineers.
- Contribute to the hiring strategy and participate in interviews and hiring decisions.
- Act as a point of contact for other areas of the business.
- Relentlessly remove impediments blocking your team.
The team operates remotely in predominantly European locations. We have aggressive hiring plans in 2021 and the role has a lot of potential for growth. Previous remote management experience is not a hard requirement but those new to it may benefit from being able to regularly spend some time in the London office.
Since (almost) everything we do is open source [1] [2] you can get a great feel for exactly what it would be like to work on Element - joining dev-centric channels such as #element-dev:matrix.org provides a window into the core team and the community. Come and say hi!
Requirements
- You have experience leading a high-performing team of engineers, including managing and shipping cross-functional or multi-team projects.
- You enjoy collaborating with Product Management, Technical Account Management and UX Design on the product discovery amp; delivery lifecycle.
- You are endlessly curious about the technologies your team works with and strive to keep your technical knowledge sharp. While there is a hands-on component to the role, you must feel comfortable knowing your greatest impact won't be as a technical contributor.
- Earlier in your career, you have previously worked as a developer on a complex end user-facing application. We don’t need you to have worked on a chat application, but familiarity with common real-time patterns and idioms would be a plus.
- You place a tremendous value on good communication and appreciate async and remote-friendly working practices.
- You understand methodologies like Agile, XP, and Lean, and see their value, but do not believe that there is ’one true way’ to get work done.
- You are comfortable with the pace and trade-offs of an early-stage startup (meaning: know how to take care of yourself and your team, get your work done without working around the clock, prioritise ruthlessly, be able to tolerate a little uncertainty and sometimes wear different hats).
Nice to haves
It would nice if any of the following were true.
- Some previous history working in an open-source environment, either professionally or as a community member.
- You have worked as a developer on a complex react based web application in the past. We don’t need you to have worked on a chat application, but familiarity with common real-time patterns and idioms would be a plus.
- An interest/experience in the world of decentralised technology and/or messaging technology.
- You have managed