Engineering Manager at SKUTOPIA

If you have spent your career wondering when you will ever get to apply Dijkstra's algorithm, Little's Law, combinatorial algorithms, and why you had to read "Introduction to Algorithms" for Computer Science when so far your entire career has been re-writing almost identical CRUD apps over and over, now you can stop wondering.

This is your chance to face real challenges in a business where solving NP-Hard problems is your day-to-day and business-critical, not just part of the interview process.

Right now, we’re scaling up the team and looking for squad leads to join us, providing technical leadership to mid-level and senior software engineers. You’ll need to have solid experience under your belt and be comfortable with our tech stack, but we’re keen to chat if you think we might be a good fit for each other. 

What we're working with

We’re working with Node, React, TypeScript, GraphQL. Most of our applications use Event Sourcing and all of our code follows Functional Programming. We use Google Cloud Platform, but most of the team had previous AWS experience and found it easy to get up to speed. 

Whilst it's a fast-paced, high-growth environment, we aren’t sacrificing quality and are committed to building things right. That means following best practices around TDD, CI/CD, etc.

We believe it’s important to be clear about where we’re going and transparent about how we’ll get there, so we have open-sourced our public technology strategy and our engineering roles canvas.  Both are available on our Technology Careers page if you’re keen to check it out. 

What you will be focusing on

• Coaching engineers to meet their professional development goals by providing timely and actionable feedback in a collaborative and empathetic manner.
• Owning learning and development for your team, ensuring the team has the skills, tools, and culture required to succeed and deliver business impact.
• Working with Product Managers and Squad Leads to ensure project resourcing allocations balance immediate business outcomes with longer-term team development objectives.
• Helping the team address large ambiguous problems by offering technical and practical insights and asking good questions.
• Helping engineers build relationships with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Ensuring infrastructure solutions are effective, cost-efficient, and within the team’s skillset to maintain (and that the skills to maintain our applications are evenly distributed amongst the team).

We expect Engineering Managers to have high emotional intelligence and remain technical enough that they can jump into a pairing session and help an engineer. That they can provide accurate and specific feedback to engineers, and accurately diagnose knowledge/skills gaps in the team.

How we work

Most of the team works from home, and we trust you to manage your time — if you’re getting your work done and you’re most productive at 8pm, that’s fine by us. We are collaborative and communicative, so if you need help or can help someone else, we expect you to reach out. 

We keep track of what’s happening with Linear and Confluence and use Slack and Google Meet to stay in touch. We also use incident.io to manage our incident response and learning process, and we use a mix of asynchronous and synchronous communication to limit unnecessary meetings. 

We have:

• A monthly all-hands business update which ensures we find opportunities to call out great work and celebrate our wins. 
• A fortnightly demo and debate session where everyone in technology can bring ideas to the table or challenge how we do things.
• Squad health check every six weeks ensure we build a happy, transparent and psychologically safe environment.

Career progression

It’s important to us that we take the time to understand your goals and give you an environment where you can learn with clarity about what progression looks like.

We make it clear what you need to do to move up, for example, from a senior to a lead role, and we’ve got paths that give you opportunities to either stay technically hands-on or progress into people leadership roles. 

We’re forecasting serious growth in the business over the next couple of years, so we’re confident that there will be plenty of challenges and opportunities to develop your skills. It’s definitely not going to be boring! 

Recruitment process

If you’re keen to find out more, apply! If you don’t have a CV to hand, a link to your LinkedIn profile or other online presence is absolutely fine. 

You’ll have a quick chat with our recruitment team, a technical interview (including live coding OR an at-home assignment if you prefer), and then a final interview that talks through your career history. We know interviews are a two-way process, so we’ll take the time to tell you more about the role and team, answer all your questions, and schedule additional chats if necessary.  

tl;dr

• Technically challenging role with a level of complexity that we don’t think you’ll get in many other places
• Node.js, React.js, TypeScript, GraphQL, GCP
• Sensible, trust first, approach to getting work done
• High growth environment where we aren’t sacrificing quality
• Defined paths and plenty of opportunities for career progression
• Send us your CV/LinkedIn profile/whatever tells us enough about you to get the conversation started