Role: Head of Engineering
Location: UK or Spain (or another European or African country for an exceptional candidate, as we aim to have our whole team on full time employment contracts)
Deadline: 14th April 2021
The Head of Engineering’s main job will be to manage the resources (developers, partners and software) to implement the company’s vision for its product and services.
This will be working in close collaboration with the CTO (Chief Architect) and the Head of Product to ensure we are designing and building the right things, the right way.
We expect our new Head of Engineering to be either a technical expert in either a mature back end (ideally Java Spring) or front end languages (ideally React.js). Either way, we’re looking for an experienced, confident programmer, who enjoys hands-on development, but excels at managing happy engineering teams.
We want to build, and we want you to too.
We have a plan to expand and invest in our engineering resources in 2021.
The Department is already an extremely agile, tightly defined team of developers. Along with our CTO and Head of Infrastructure, there are 3 senior developers working for YCBM. We also have a successful relationship with two outsourced partners, one for all our QA (currently supplying 3 testers for us) and the other for react development alongside project management (2 FTE).
So we’re a busy department, working very closely with the product, design and customer team to keep meeting the needs of our customers and the millions who book using our product each month.
Specific responsibilities will be:
- To work collaboratively with the Head of Infrastructure to deliver a stable, scalable and secure engineering platform for the company
- Day to day management of the development teams.
- Key part of the planning team, helping with the strategy and leading with the tactics.
- Responsible for both ends of the development flow: triage and sign-off/dispatch.
- Management of 3rd party outsource development and QA partners
- All hiring, training and performance management of the team
- Updates and implementation the company’s policies and procedures for security and development
- Hands on technical implementation, coding and building
We would expect the successful candidate to be able to demonstrate that they:
- Are an experienced technologist - with multiple complex programming products and projects under their belt (at least 10 years working at a senior level)
- Expert in cloud technologies, APIs and integrations
- Has line-managed a senior engineering team (mentoring and hiring too)
- Has built greenfield applications from scratch, managed legacy code stacks, refactored and migrated systems (be prepared to speak in detail about this)
- Has taken responsibility for and solved complex problems at a senior level
- Understand and expert at how to break down a strategic architectural vision into a manageable, agile plan
In our ideal world they will also be:
- Familiar with a broad range of AWS, configured via Terraform
- Expert at working with RESTful APIs
- Knowledgeable about the idiosyncrasies of Jira (and its alternatives)
- Able to speak Spanish to a technically competent level (4 of our developers are based in Spain)
- A veteran remote worker and instinctive collaborator
Our Tech:
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Backend: Java, Spring, Hibernate, MySQL (Aurora), DynamoDB, Redis (Elasticache)
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Frontend: React.js, component driven develoment, css in js, moment.js
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Build: Git, Maven, Lerna, babel, webpack, SASS, AWS Code* Tools (e.g. CodeBuild)
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Test: JUnit, Jest, Cypress, Playwright, Supertest, Powermock
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Infrastructure: AWS (IAM, Route53, Beanstalk, ++) Terraform, Liquibase
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Additional: OAuth, RESTful design, Twilio APIs, Google APIs, MS Graph, WebDAV/CalDAV
Benefits working at YCBM
- 100% remote, your equipment, wifi / office or co-working space all covered
- Salary £110k+ this is for a manager-level post. All our salaries and transparent and published internally, everyone's fortunes rise with the success of the company
- 'Unlimited' holiday (plus public holidays). We expect everyone to be taking 5-6 weeks leave a year
- Fully funded private health / dental insurance (in UK / Spain)
- 5% employer contribution to private pension (in UK
- Fully funded leave policies for parents
- Participation in profit share after 1.5 years
- International travel / company retreats
What do you need to do to get this job?
- We’re big fans of cover letters from applicants who have done their homework on us. We want to see that you’re passionate about what we do and interested in how we got here
- Tell us why you would want to work for a company like ours, the value you would bring and how you’d learn along the way
- We’d love to hear what you’ve achieved and what you’re most proud of. In particular we want see your strengths and qualities that make you a great fit for this role
- And most importantly, think about how you will stand out from other applicants. We’re absolutely only looking for candidates who are serious about their desire to work for us - this means generic cover letters/cvs are a big no no for us so please don’t expect much progress if you send us one of these.