This role started at Piktochart as Andrea (CTO, co founder) is the leader at the technical organization at Piktochart. After 9 years of being in the role, he has decided to leave Piktochart in a more capable pair of hands. As a co-founder, he wants to see Piktochart succeed in its next phase of growth and is looking for a technical leader with a good track record of building excellent engineering teams, balancing people, technical and business requirements.
We now have the opening of a Head of Engineering, reporting directly to the CEO, with 4 tech leads reporting to this person (FrontEnd, BackEnd, DevOps, QA). Our tech team currently comprises of 20 people, QA- 4, DevOps - 2, BackEnd - 4, FrontEnd - 12. To describe just a little bit of us, we are transitioning to an Agile practice.
About you
You have led engineering teams for startups that have a similar profile to us (SAAS/bootstrapped/ semi-distributed). You have shown how you support business outcomes by ensuring that the right technical people and processes are in place. 70% of the engineering teams are based in GMT+8 timezone.
Build a culture of excellence
You inspire, mentor and foster a culture of growth as we continue to drive a high level of performance across our engineering culture. You are passionate about reviewing talent, technical team’s design, employee engagement, performance criteria because you know it’s important to be intentional on their growth. Apart from being a thoughtful leader, you would also demonstrate a self-motivated aptitude for learning and growth. You ensure engineers understand business direction and how individual work facilitates end goals
Questions you may face:
- How do you decide on team allocation - do you get the developers to self assign or will you intervene and decide?
- Do developer OKRs stop at the team or the individual level?
- How do we ensure that the developers actually get in touch with customers?
Technical and Operational Excellence
You possess technical skills covering architecture, engineering practices, performance, reliability, delivery and quality and familiarity with modern architectures, frameworks, languages, and approaches to solving engineering problems. You will build a reliable, scalable and highly performing technology stack using industry best practices. You will ensure our architecture is flexible and scalable to allow for growth, but are capable of making trade-offs between speed and perfection.
Questions you may face:
- Product team says that we need a Tableau-like dashboard for our metrics so that we do not rely on static reports that are generated and we can self-serve, how do we ensure we do not pay tens of thousands but also have something open source that ultimately means you need to have a team of devs dedicated on it?
- Everything goes through the backlog - so who prioritizes/assigns bugs?
- Do we use X vs Y to create A output?
Strategic Vision
You'll be responsible for consistently delivering meaningful features, applications and technology solutions that solve business problems. You'll consistently communicate and deliver to commitments and increase the velocity of our teams by removing roadblocks. You'll build a strong long-term technology strategy that aligns with company’s strategic plan and influences the overall company direction.
Questions you may face
- How do you decide whether something is so painful it merits a full rewrite?
- How do we design the code and tech stack so that we’re able to A/B test our pricing packages? What are some of the obstacles that are preventing us from running multiple experiments on our app?
You have been in a technical leader in the past, and are excited to put the company in a position that will succeed. You are people oriented and results driven. This is a fully remote role and you will have to be located in Asia/Europe.