We are hiring a Director of Engineering with a strong operations focus. Your main responsibilities will be to (1) ensure that production runs smoothly and (2) own the planning and release process in order to make sure that we ship on time, and
Managing the operations of multiple products is a real challenge for someone who knows how to scale an engineering organization. We have the ambition of launching a few new products too, but cannot do that until we are sure that we’re building on a solid foundation.
Our technical team is composed of 12 people, and growing.
Our infrastructure runs on Google Cloud Platform, and more precisely a mix of Google App Engine, Google Apps Script, Firebase Real Time Database, PostgreSQL among other components. Our main programming languages are Java, Apps Script, Javascript and Typescript on the front-end.
This is a technical role first, and managerial second. You’ll have to get your hands dirty and we expect you to have a broad range of technical skills. You won’t be managing people directly at first until you have proven yourself.
The Director of Engineering Operations will report to the CTO and work closely with the Product and Development teams. We had offices in Paris and Milan that might reopen, however the role can be remotely-based anywhere in the EMEA region.
Your responsibilities:
- Keep the lights on. That’s the most important part. Thanks to the amazing infrastructure provided by Google, they rarely go off, but having so many users, every time that happens is extremely painful. This means planning for the worst, thinking about risks, monitoring the age, maintenance and fit with our evolving scale of the various pieces of our infrastructure.
- Drive and own the development and release planning in order to make sure we release on time. This means preempting and warning about delays, whatever their cause, ensuring everything’s ready on time for a new release, and communicating continuously over how the planning is evolving.
- Implement or improve our testing, QA and release processes in order to make them as robust and automated (where it makes sense) as possible. That means modernizing our continuous deployment pipelines, environments infrastructure, provisioning infrastructure, etc
- Own the downtime process. Jump on a production issue whatever the time and day, and don’t quit the frontline until it’s solved. Ensure support and sales channels are maintained up to speed on the details and what to communicate to customers. Write the post-mortem and implement remediation actions.
- Prepare and execute big migrations. We have a number of products that have outgrown their database technology and will need some form of migration.
You:
- You don’t blame interns who drop the database, you make it impossible that it happens in the first place
- You care very deeply about keeping the lights on, and will take full responsibility for it
- You get to the bottom of things
- You think in terms of dynamics, risks, what happens through time
- You really like organizing things and “running them” more than “building them”. We want to hire someone that will teach us how to work
- Extremely time- and detail-oriented
Your qualifications:
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Experience: 5+ years as a software engineer, and 5+ years as an engineering manager preferably for SaaS products with at least 1 million users. Good knowledge of micro-service architecture and distributed systems.
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Design tools: proficiency with spreadsheets, Github, Jira and other typical software engineering tools
- Language: fluent English, French or Italian is a big plus
- Writing: you enjoy writing, you care about words and grammar, you are sharp and thorough
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Collaboration: Ability to build effective relationships with colleagues across organizations and functional groups
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Project management: you are organized, able to manage multiple projects at the same time, and know how to report progress in a clear and interesting way
Benefits:
- A good compensation that gives you financial peace of mind, wherever you live
- 30 days of vacation
- Lunch vouchers (for every worked day)
- 50% of public transportation for daily commute covered
- Medical, dental and vision insurance
- Paid parental leave
How to apply:
We want to get a sense of how you think. To that end, please use your cover letter to share work you’ve done in your career that is relevant with the responsibilities listed above.
We’ll let you know that we’ve received your application and what the next steps are. We can’t wait to hear from you!
We strongly encourage candidates of all different backgrounds and identities to apply. Each new hire is an opportunity for us to bring in a different perspective, and we are always eager to further diversify our company. AwesomeTable is committed to building an inclusive, supportive place for you to do the best and most rewarding work of your career.