Senior Engineering Manager

Summary

Join OpenSesame as a Senior Engineering Manager and help a fully-remote team of 14 engineers across North America, South America, the UK, and India to utilize Extreme Programming (XP). You will provide the context, skills, and processes for your team to deliver high-quality work. This role requires regular meetings with team members in India and the western US, necessitating an early Eastern US schedule. In the first 90 days, you will ramp up, understand team needs, and develop an improvement plan. Within six months, you will establish yourself as an expert on team needs and act as a leader in the management team. By the end of your first year, you will be a leader in the management team, advising other managers and implementing systemic improvements.

Requirements

• Be the senior of two managers of a fully-remote team that consists of 14 engineers across North America, South America, UK, and India
• An early Eastern US schedule, such as 7am-4pm Eastern time, will be required
• This is a remote-first role based in Latin America or Canada

Responsibilities

• Form rapport with team members, the team’s general manager and other stakeholders, product and UX representatives, and management peers
• Understand your teams’ current processes
• Understand stakeholders’ needs and frustrations
• Understand team members’ needs and frustrations
• Understand team members’ career goals
• Collaborate with team leads on team members’ career development spreadsheets
• Identify team members’ strengths and weaknesses
• Hire contractors and full-time employees as appropriate
• Understand your teams’ vision and current mission
• Understand how the team’s work fits into the big picture of the organization
• Understand how to use your teams’ products
• Work with your teams’ product managers to track mission indicators
• Work with your teams’ product managers to collect estimates and make forecasts as needed
• Establish a division of labor between yourself and the other manager for your team
• Work with Eng. VP to establish a plan for improving your teams’ capability and capacity, with a focus on introducing and improving XP skills
• Understand and fulfill organizational governance requirements, including budgeting and reporting
• Set up a development environment on your computer and check out teams’ code
• Understand the design and architecture of your teams’ code at a high level
• Establish a relationship of trust with the team’s other manager
• Maintain awareness of team dynamics and team members’ interpersonal relationships
• Develop team members’ intrinsic motivation to do great work
• Provide or source training, coaching, and/or mentoring for team members’ weak spots
• Provide coaching, mentoring and/or mediation as needed to continuously improve your team’s team dynamics
• Develop team members’ skills with an eye towards expanding OpenSesame’s bench strength and future leadership capacity
• Ensure the team has the context needed to make excellent decisions without your active involvement
• Strike a balance between shielding the team from stakeholder distractions and enabling the team to work directly with stakeholders to understand their needs
• Provide insights to your team about how their work is perceived by internal business stakeholders
• Develop your team’s capability to independently take ownership, share leadership, and deliver value, with a focus on XP practices
• Remove yourself as a bottleneck to team decision making
• Identify paths for continuously improving developer experience and internal quality
• Create opportunities for cross-team pollination and growth
• Advise Eng. VP on how to systemically improve teams’ capability and capacity across the engineering organization
• Work with management peers to understand other teams’ needs and opportunities
• Begin to mentor less-experienced managers, with focus on the other manager on your team
• Be a resource that other managers turn to for advice and guidance
• Take the lead in implementing systemic improvements across teams
• Work with product management to improve execution of cross-team initiatives
• Advise Eng. VP on systemic opportunities for improving internal business stakeholder relationships