Head of Engineering
Wildbit
Wildbit is the team behind Postmark, DMARC Digests, People-First Jobs, and Beanstalk. We’re self-funded, profitable, and have been working remotely since 2000.
We believe that businesses serve humans, and our team is committed to proving you can grow a profitable company while prioritizing people first. We exist to support our team, and our values and products reflect the care and intention that we operate with.
We’re looking for someone to join the Wildbit leadership team as Head of Engineering. This is a 100% remote position and open to candidates based in the United States.
Leadership at Wildbit
You would be joining our leadership team, representing Engineering, alongside Product, Marketing, Customer Service/Success, Finance, and People. Our leadership team is currently 57% women, and we’re proud of that. Our people-first approach to our business and leadership means that we work to surround ourselves with diverse voices and lead with curiosity, an open heart, and an open mind. A great leader’s path to success is directly tied to building safe and inclusive teams. In this role, you’d be advocating for ~10 engineers and using these values to sustainably and thoughtfully grow the team.
Engineering & Product
Our culture places a strong emphasis on providing ownership and autonomy for each individual. With influence from Conway’s Law and Team Topologies, this year’s focus has been organizing product teams to formalize how autonomy and ownership occur in our work. As the largest team at Wildbit, engineering will play a big role in how this evolves as we grow.
Our products are primarily written in Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, and C#/.NET. Ruby on Rails and JavaScript power the majority of our customer-facing applications. Our backend stack (mostly on Postmark) is written in C#/.NET. Some of the technologies and platforms our engineering team works with daily include: AWS (Lambda, RDS, ECS, etc.), MySQL, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, Benthos, Kafka, Grafana, and Kibana.
The role
As we grow our engineering team across multiple products (and more coming), we’re seeing a need for consistency and coordination around the how and why we work in engineering. While working closely with Rian, our Head of Product, and Chris, our Co-founder/CTO, you will influence the long-term vision and implementation of our engineering culture and process across products as they reach maturity in the product lifecycle.
We believe the Head of Engineering’s purpose is to facilitate the most enjoyable, fulfilling environment for our engineers, one that’s directly connected to the needs of our customers and the business. We use the word facilitate with intention, as the goal is to enable and coordinate decisions across a competent team and to create autonomy and ownership in each person’s work.
Your responsibilities will include:
- Building strong personal relationships with each individual on your team and creating a safe environment for continuous improvement.
- Rolling out engineering principles and processes where they didn’t exist before (e.g., dev process, partnering with the People team on performance reviews, levels, and ladders).
- Working directly with the co-founders and leadership team, giving you the opportunity to take on a wide range of responsibilities with a high degree of autonomy.
- Planning roadmaps and organizing teams that balance the priorities of the business, customers, and engineering.
- Being an expert leading experts. You can dive into code and troubleshoot a production issue but prefer to coach and enable people.
- Knowing when to prioritize speed vs. quality and helping the team through expensive architectural decisions on our most critical systems.
- Being comfortable when the path isn’t always clear and encouraging rapid iteration and continuous learning.
- Motivating and inspiring a team in a remote-first environment and finding fulfillment in your teams’ happiness and accomplishments.
- Creating hiring plans, interviewing engineers, and smoothly onboarding new team members with a commitment to diversity, transparency, inclusivity, and accountability.
- Facilitating communication across multiple engineering teams to remove roadblocks, spot issues, and align goals.
What you'll be doing
Build strong relationships with your team.Relationships are at the core of what we do and who we are at Wildbit. Strong relationships, empathy, and trust make creativity, productivity, and growth possible. By prioritizing building relationships with our team, you’ll be able to do more in your role while supporting your team and community even better. At Wildbit, we move mountains for our team. You will know each team member while understanding what they enjoy working on, what they hope to achieve long term, and when they need a change of pace. We don’t place folks into boxes but instead prioritize their fulfillment as it evolves naturally over time. Your leadership success is not having all of the answers—it’s creating the culture, context, and environment that allows individuals to make these decisions on their own.
Long term advocate for engineeringWe’re a product-led company, constantly focused on the value we bring to our customers, our team, and our community. You will be the advocate and voice for the engineers at Wildbit with a long-term view of success. This could include assisting engineers on architecture decisions, upholding engineering standards in products, or coordinating communication across teams. Working directly with the leadership team, you will assist in annual and quarterly planning, creating clear alignment across customers, engineering, and the business.
Define and implement long term engineering cultureAfter 20 years building and growing many software products, we have plenty of opinions and philosophies on the right way to do things. That's also the struggle. With multiple products and teams, we're in need of a unified development process, standards, and philosophies. You’ll build consensus among the engineering and product teams to determine the “why” and “how” behind our work, helping shape the principles, process, and methods that guide engineering teams. The ultimate goal is to create the most enjoyable environment possible to work - reducing toil, providing consistency where it matters, mediating conflicts, setting standards, and opening up space to think and work creatively.
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