Company: SkyVerge
Website: https://www.skyverge.com
Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Howdy 👋 We’re the folks at SkyVerge, where we build tools that help over 100k+ eCommerce brands grow and manage their businesses. Our products include Jilt, an email marketing platform designed for eCommerce stores, and over 60+ extensions for WooCommerce, like WooCommerce Memberships and others.
Our team is 100% remote, with 29 people distributed all over the world.
We’re looking for an experienced, thoughtful Engineering Manager to help lead and coach our growing team of 10 engineers.
The Role
You’ll lead, coach, and mentor our team of 10+ engineers on how to be more effective individual contributors, as well as stronger team players. You’ll hold weekly check-ins (1:1s) with each team member to share feedback, check in on goals, and celebrate individual strengths and contributions. You’ll provide career development, planning, and guidance to the team by aligning individual and personal/professional growth goals to broader company objectives.
As a part of the leadership team, you’ll work closely with others on the Product, Design, Marketing, and Support teams. By championing an ethos of continuous improvement, you’ll help us grow the expertise of the team in performant, reliable, scalable, maintainable architecture. To drive these improvements, you’ll be responsible for analyzing team performance with qualitative and quantitative benchmarks, ensuring that the quality of our engineering is continually raised. From these metrics, you will help to refine, document, and unify our engineering best practices and project management processes and tooling across the existing area-specific teams.
As our first dedicated Engineering Manager, you’ll have the opportunity to help define and shape what an important leadership role for our company going forward. You’ll contribute to creating plans for prioritizing technical and resourcing challenges within the organization, and help with the recruiting efforts to meet those challenges. You’ll assist with the hiring, onboarding, and training of both new engineers, as well as future engineering leadership.
Here are some things you may do on a given day:
- Conduct 1:1s with your team members
- Assess code reviews and provide feedback on how to review more effectively
- Review, track, and give feedback on team member progress vs personal objectives and professional development goals
- Investigate stalled stories and coach team members on how to unblock work or prioritize effectively
- Review upcoming product priorities, team capacity, and make recommendations on how to structure our team to achieve company long term goals
- Propose an experiment to tweak a project management process to improve work throughput, along with the metrics to be measured to validate or disprove the hypothesis
- Update or clarify our internal engineering and project management playbooks based on feedback/uncertainty from the team
- Collaborate with the design team to help define how work is finalized and handed off to the engineering team for maximum success in implementation
- Read an article on a project management technique and draft an internal summary for discussion with the team
On the first day you will:
- Meet your team and get familiar with how we work
- Setup your environment and tooling
In the first week you will:
- Hold initial 1:1s with everyone on the engineering team and participate in our weekly engineering meeting
- Review and become familiar with our existing project management and professional development approaches
- Improve our onboarding course and team documentation based on your experience
In the first month you will:
- Gain a comprehensive understanding of the business goals, engineering team goals, and each team member’s personal strengths / areas for improvement, goals, and objectives, and how those relate to the broader company goals.
- Begin tracking key workflow and engineering metrics to provide a baseline for continued improvement.
To succeed in this position, you should have:
- Experience in coaching and mentoring a distributed team of engineers
- A strong ability to listen and understand others, coupled with humility and empathy. You naturally build excellent relationships with your team, and peers, and are able to deliver difficult feedback when needed, in a constructive and supportive manner.
- A high degree of technical competency, with the ability to break down complex topics and make them seem approachable
- An obsession with continuously improving the way you and your team work (you believe that improving the way we work is even more important than doing the work)
- Tenacity combined with the willingness to question assumptions and dig deep to find the root cause of user confusion or issues
Who you’ll work with:
- Justin Stern, CTO - You’ll be reporting to Justin, and partnering with him to strengthen our remote engineering culture and agile project management processes.
- Beka Rice, Head of Product - You’ll work with Beka to understand our products in detail and learn all the ways that our customers use them.
- Ian Misner, Support Team Lead - You’ll work with Ian to ensure that our engineering team delivers consistent and increasing value to our customers, and how every decision we make impacts our users.
REQUIREMENTS
You
In the past you’ve been a successful engineer. However, your real passion has been leading, mentoring, and coaching people to accomplish great things. Your other passion is helping your team evolve to the next stage in their careers, whether that is becoming an even more effective individual contributor, growing into a management role, or transitioning into an entirely new role.
You love keeping up-to-date with the latest engineering management best practices and tools, and are constantly tweaking and improving the way you work. You’re curious and excited to learn, so adopting new tooling or digging into a new app is something you’re keen to tackle. (After all, it is a new experience for you to learn from!) You know how to operate a hydraulic press, or at least watched a YouTube video about them and think they’re totally rad.
Finally, you can’t wait to join a growing team that loves their work as much as you do, affords the opportunity to work on challenging & interesting projects, continuously learn and improve, and constantly ships their work. You’re a great writer and can communicate effectively whether drafting up a pitch document, chatting in Slack, editing a wiki page, or drafting a project retrospective. You know that great coaching is really about great communication, so you’re committed to explaining your thought process clearly. You can communicate fluently in English, or at least as close as anyone can come to fluent English, because really, it’s English.
BENEFITS
Our team is fully-remote and we communicate primarily through Slack, Clubhouse, Google Docs, Basecamp, and a few short, weekly meetings via Zoom — we believe the best work happens when given lots of uninterrupted time that’s free of distractions.
As a remote team, we believe that regular meetups are invaluable for getting to know each other better, so in addition to our quarterly planning meet-ups, you should also be available for 1-2 company-paid team trips per year. Curious about what those are like? Check out our recap of our last team retreat (SkyTrip), which brought the entire team to a Scottish estate for a week. It’s a plus if you think (like we do) that bears are absolutely the coolest animals in the forest. 🐻You can see what the team has to say about working with us here.
Process
After an initial screening, you’ll get an email with a few questions to answer. Following that, you’ll have a few ~45 minute phone chats with different people on our team to learn more about you and answer any questions you have about the position and company.
Here are some benefits we're happy to offer to our team members:
- Competitive salary
- 27 days of paid time-off, in addition to 2 company holidays (SkyVerge Day in March, Founders Day in June 😀)
- Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance for US and Canadian residents and their families (reimbursements for comparable care for non-US/Canadian residents)
- 401k/RRSP Retirement plan with 4% company match for US/Canadian residents (contributions to comparable plans for non-US/Canadian residents)
- 8 weeks paid parental leave for new mothers and fathers
- Work flexible hours from anywhere that has a reliable internet connection
- Tools (hardware/software) to help you be productive
- Allowance for professional growth (books, courses, conferences)
- Home office or co-working allowance
- A Kindle to help you keep learning
Applications accepted through September 17th.
CLICK HERE TO APPLY
Source: Remote OK, SkyVerge
