Head of Engineering (Remote)
WP Media
Are you an inspirational, forward-thinking, and people-centric seasoned engineering leader? Do you excel at transforming vision and strategy into results? Have you led other engineering organizations to achieve next level of excellence during the growth phase of the business life cycle? Are you pragmatic with an unshakable focus on strategy, execution, and results? Do you have depth and breadth in leading SaaS product development?
If you answered yes to these questions, we are sure this position will sound super exciting to you. 🤩
Keep reading for more details! 📝
Become Our New Head of Engineering!
As the Head of Engineering you will lead the strategy and execution for our cross-functional engineering teams to deliver an exceptional customer experience and lower customer effort while empowering our customers to easily and quickly gain the benefits of our products.
WP Media is the French company behind successful WordPress plugins like WP Rocket and Imagify. WP Rocket is the premium caching plugin for WordPress used by +1,000,000 websites and +120,000 customers worldwide. Our plugin makes sites go at the speed of light in just a few clicks. Imagify is our free image optimization service, including a free WordPress plugin: we have already optimized more than 2,000,000,000 images! 😲
You will join and lead our remote, global team, covering AMER and EMEA regions. To facilitate this international teamwork, you live or work in a time zone between UTC+2 to UTC-5. We are so curious to know which new country will be added to our distributed team map! 🌍
Our Technical Stack:
Our products are powered by:
- Languages: Python, PHP, and JavaScript
- Frameworks: Django, Lumen, Symfony, Ember, and Node
- WordPress for our plugins and websites
- Architecture: modular, monolithic, and microservices
- GitHub for our code repositories
- OVH Cloud Services for SaaS APIs and websites
What Your Mission Will Be:
Our Engineering mission is:We engineer and deliver production-ready products that make our customers' websites better, faster, and lighter.
Your mission is to:
- empower the engineering department to achieve its mission
- ensure the product vision is realized through quality and excellence
- ensure we serve the current and future technology and engineering needs of the company
- nurture, scale, and empower happy, healthy, and high-performance teams
What You Will Be Responsible For:
Here is a list describing the focal areas you'll be responsible for in this role (do you happen to like making lists? So do we!):
The engineering department is responsible for:
- developing the things Product envisions
- delivering quality
- serving the technology and automation needs across our business
- partnering with Product to envision the future
The Head of Engineering is responsible to make all of the above happen.
You will ensure all aspects of the department (people, processes, infrastructure, operations, etc.) achieve its responsibilities today, tomorrow, and far into the future.
You will lead our global Engineering strategy and execution to:
- People
- Hiring
- Career development
- Team management
- Team health and happiness
- Builds and scales high-performance, agile, and collaborative teams
- Engineering operations
- Owning, managing, and optimizing the overall engineering processes, practices, and tooling
- Product and internal Infrastructures
- Managing and paying down our technical debt
- Delivery
- Executing the technical and product strategies and roadmaps
- Engineer and deliver what our technical and product strategies envisioned
- Readiness
- ensures our teams are capable and ready to deliver results when needed
- ensures we have capacity to deliver when needed
- ensures our operations, networks, and infrastructure are ready and available to serve our customers, team, and company
- Results:
- Deliver the right results of quality, and excellence
- Drives agility and continuous improvement
- Owning and managing engineering budget responsibilities while being fiscally pragmatic and accountable
- Partnerships:
- Partners with the CEO to
- Co-develop the technical vision, roadmap, and strategy
- Identify and assess technical risks
- Inspect and continuously improve:
- our standards and practices
- technical debt
- architecture
- Partners with the CPO to
- define the “how” for each feature, issue, and task in the Product Backlog
- define the “how much” for product planning
- provide timely and thoughtful progress updates
- ensure we engineer and build what Product envisioned
- Partners with the Head of Support to
- hear the voice of the customer
- understand, access, and reduce the impacts from our work on the Support department
- Partners with all leaders of the company for our business technology needs
- Partners with the CEO to
What Do You Need To Excel at This Job:
Here is a short list of the key attributes you'll need to excel in this role:
- You are an exceptional servant leader
- You empower your people
- You are a team builder
- You are an operations architect and optimizer
- You are a performance and excellence maximizer
- You get the right things done
- You deliver the right results
- You are fiscally pragmatic
Seasoned engineering leader with proven success.
You have years and years of engineering leadership experience in a SaaS product company at scale with millions of requests per day. You've successfully led and grown cross-functional, globally distributed department of software, QA, DevOps, and systems engineers. Over the years of your career, you've amassed breadth and depth in what it takes for an engineering organization to deliver exceptional product and customer experiences and impact.
Seasoned engineer.
We are a technology company. The leader for this role will be a seasoned engineer. In order to lead this department, you will need to be able to walk in their shoes and understand how well enough to guide, facilitate, advice, and validate. You are not expected to code or do hands-on engineering. We need you to be working in the weeks and months ahead, to see where we are going, what the risks are, and how we can get there. To do this, you will need to a strong technical background.
Servant leader.
Your philosophy of leadership aligns to the servant leader style. You believe your role is to serve the Engineering people. We value empowered people and teams. As a servant leader, you actively push decision making down to those closest to the problem and actively coach people to develop their decision making superpowers.
People empowerer. Team builder.
You know that to deliver results, you start with happy, high-performance engineering people and teams. You are a proven and exceptional people empowerer and team builder. You are an outstanding and effective coach. You serve your people by actively developing and coaching them as well as creating opportunities for each person to continuously learn, improve, and grow. You advocate for continuous learning and improvement. You create a sense of psychological safety for your people. You excel at recruiting and retaining top high performing talent.
Unshakeable focus on execution, results, and strategy.
You possess an unshakeable focus on execution, results, and strategy. Your eyes are focused on the vision of where we are going while your feet are firmly planted in daily to ensure your people are on course and moving towards that vision and the results we must achieve.
You are data-driven and masterful at developing the right set of metrics. You know that the right set of metrics is your compass, helping everyone to know if we are on track.
Stellar communication skills.
You present complex information to audiences ranging from cross-functional leads to executives and leave them informed and inspired.
Operations and performance maximizer.
Through the years, you've refined your operational approach to maximize performance and excellence. You get the right things done and deliver the right results. You leverage OKRs to focus on and achieve those right things and results. You have an eye for identifying and removing friction from the engineering process (e.g. developing and implementing internal service tooling to automate processes).
Tune and refine, rather than redesign.
You are agile, building on top of what exists and is already working well. You tune and refine, adapting for your new company, organizational design, department, and teams. You know that big sweeping changes are disruptive and costly. You opt to take baby steps.
Champion of continuous learning and improvement.
You advocate and champion continuous learning and improvement. You see mistakes and missteps as opportunities to learn, improve, and grow. You encourage everyone around you to embrace these principles as part of your strategy to achieve results and better serve our customers.
Being Yourself.
The WP Media team is diverse and composed of people from all over the world. Respect, collaboration, and inclusivity are some of our core values (more on this below). Every day of work is an exciting opportunity to get in touch with fantastic people who will enrich your cultural and professional background.
Proficient knowledge of English.
Empathetic and collaborative communication is key: you are comfortable writing, speaking, and listening in English with technical and non-technical teammates.
Do you want to know a few other things we appreciate about our candidates? Don’t worry if you don’t have experience in any of these areas. We’ll teach you.
Previous freelance or remote job experience.
Slack will be your virtual office, where all the life of the company takes place.
Know web performance.
You have experience with web performance optimization. You know how to measure page load speeds. You understand caching. Terms like gzip, preload, minify, and lazyload are not foreign to you. You know the difference between PageSpeed score and page load time. If you don’t know, we’ll teach you.
Love for cats or Corgis! 😸🐶
What would our working days be without our four-legged friends?
What Else You Should Know About Our Company: WP Media
Founded in 2014 in the beautiful Lyon, France, WP Media is an equal opportunity employer with a distributed team of +35 teammates living around the world.
Do We Share the Same Values?
Mutual respect, collaboration, and inclusivity.
These are the fundamental values that support our life as a team.
Healthy balance between work and private life.
We encourage our employees to enjoy their family and their hobbies with flexible working hours and minimum vacation policy (you should take a minimum of 5 weeks per year: really, we don’t count them!).
We care about the work you do, not about the hours you sit at your desk.
You can organize your working day with flexible working hours. There are no time cards to stamp, just customers to make happy and friendly teammates to work with!
Transparent culture.
We have a public salary grid. Once a year, when the company does well, we share our profits with the team in the form of bonuses.
We like to see each other in person whenever possible.
Every year, we organize a trip with the whole team and spend a week of coworking and fun activities together.
To give you an idea, so far we have traveled to Spain, Portugal, and Mexico:
Now that we've told you so much about us, it's your turn. 😉
Let us know why you would like to become our Head of Engineering and why you think you are the person we are looking for.
We can’t wait to receive your application! 🌟
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