Product Engineering Lead at OfferZen

You are a senior software engineer who is gaining experience to be in a position to choose between a management career track or a technical one and as such, includes responsibilities typical of both tracks.

You spend a significant part of your time leading execution through coding (60% - 80%) and the remaining time on people management and leadership activities (20% - 40%).

Mission

OfferZen exists to unlock human potential and support the people who can use tech to make the world a better place.

Manage delivery within your product squad. Lead a group of 3 software engineers in the architecting and building of full-stack product features. Support your product manager by identifying how to solve the most impactful problems. 

The growth product squad is responsible for helping drive the growth of OfferZen’s base of engaged fans, both hiring managers and job seekers. The squad accomplishes this through experiences such as our activation and reactivation journeys, referral program, marketplace previews and the blog. By providing and supporting internal tools, we also enable our events, content and marketing teams to pursue growth initiatives. Working within the delivery team of the growth product squad, you will contribute to this mission by delivering impactful and quality software at a high cadence. 

Responsibilities

Processes

• Help product managers assess mission feasibility, complexity, scope, and size.
• Manage and contribute to the technical roadmap of your squad to ensure we build towards the technical vision.
• Triage and prioritise bugs with the product manager.
• Coordinate with engineering managers and leads from other squads during collaborative missions.
• Optimise the delivery processes of the engineering team.

Execution

• Design, test, and ship great front-end and back-end code every week to build impactful new features for users and internal operational teams.
• Debug production issues across services at multiple levels of our stack.
• Manage the delivery workload in the squad in order to work on the highest priority items.
• Making trade-offs to the appropriate degree of autonomy (and know when not to make the trade-off in isolation).
• Facilitate collaborative technical design, rotating leadership based on team strengths.
• Ensure the team is equipped to commit to and deliver work timeously.
• Communicate the progress of delivery efforts to stakeholders.

Team

• Mentor and upskill junior engineers.
• Onboard new engineers into the team.
• Drive the career progression for engineers in your squad (where applicable).
• Run performance reviews of engineers in your squad.
• Foster continuous improvement by encouraging regular retrospectives, identifying efficiency gains, and collaboratively refining approaches to enhance team effectiveness.
• Ensure the engineering team is happy, motivated and excited.

Experience

• Minimum of two years of experience working with Ruby on Rails or Node.js in a production environment.
• Minimum of five years of experience working with React, Svelte or Vue in a production environment.
• Minimum of one year of experience working with headless content management systems such as Sanity or Strapi.
• Some familiarity and experience with modern frontend frameworks and tooling such as Next.js, Astro and Vercel.

Background and personality

• BEng or BSc CS degree, or equivalent working experience.
• 8+ years experience in software development.
• Used to working in small teams.
• Good communication skills.
• Driven by learning and continuously striving towards self-improvement.
• High confidence, low ego.
• Capable of backing opinions and decisions with data.
• Driven to work super hard to achieve a high level of personal execution.
• Attention to detail.

What it's like to work here

We love to do fun stuff together. We are focused on building a connected tribe and a sense of belonging. We value unique and diverse approaches and ensure we create opportunities to share and learn from each other. We have regular online events, show and tells and a book club as well as regional and annual off-site events.

We're dedicated to authenticity: We treat people as people, caring personally and speaking openly. We foster low-ego behaviour - we own our mistakes as well as our victories. We're never about blame. We're always about honesty, learning and continuous improvement. We ensure lots of transparency and visibility. From OKRs and strategy to analytics and company performance numbers, it's all available for you to see and understand.

We're passionate about learning and levelling up: Everyone at OfferZen strives for a growth mindset. We read books, listen to podcasts, share expertise obsessively, then take on hard challenges with smart guidance and support. When things go wrong, we look for the learning and how to improve.

We’re all about balance: We believe that maintaining a healthy balance between home and work is the key to feeling happier and more productive. We work fully remote and also offer 20 days of leave a year which are available to use from the time you start. 

*This role can be based locally or remotely - we welcome all applicants based in South Africa.