Software Engineering Manager
Published on March 08, 2023
The Mission
We believe that leaders who are most passionate about seeing their team, and individuals on it, succeed have both an understanding of what it takes to thrive in each role and how the team contributes to taking OfferZen to the next level.
The primary focus of your role is to manage delivery within your product team and build a world-class team (hiring and coaching), and putting them in the best position to succeed. This is not a hands-on coding role and you have to be willing to step away from the technical details to focus on delivery and the well-being of your team. You’ll lead a group of between 4 and 8 software engineers in the architecting and building of full-stack product features and engineering systems, and partner with your Product Manager by identifying how to solve the most impactful problems.
What success in this role looks like:
- You’re running (and building) a high performing team that is crushing it.
- You’re syncing-up regularly with the Product Manager and Designer on discovery work and keeping them in the loop on how your team is progressing through the work.
- Everyone is clear on what they’re working on, why it’s important and features and systems are getting shipped as expected.
- They’re also clear on how they are developing their skills, and thinking – and how it continues to make them world-class in their craft.
- You can have high bandwidth conversations on system design.
- Team members share ideas to make things even better and receive feedback on them if not adopted.
What you’ll do
Processes
- Help the product manager understand the feasibility, complexity, scope and size of missions and tasks
- Manage and contribute the technical roadmap of your squad to ensure we build towards the technical vision
- Triage and prioritise bugs with the product manager
- Coordinate with engineering managers and leads from other squads during collaborative missions
- Optimise the delivery processes of the engineering team
Execution
- Manage the development workload in the squad in order to work on the highest priority items
- Making trade-offs to the appropriate degree of autonomy (and know when not to make the trade-off in isolation).
- Technical design of the solution
- Ensure that the code that gets shipped is of high quality, scalable, reliable, and inline with the technical vision
- Estimate and size tasks in order to have an accurate view on the development effort
- Communicate the progress of delivery efforts to stakeholders
Team
- Mentoring and upskill junior engineers
- Identify and fill delivery capacity gaps
- Onboard new engineers into the team
- Drive the career progression for engineers in your squad
- Run performance reviews of engineers in your squad
- Ensure the engineering team is happy, motivated and excited
Who You Are
- You love developing and growing people and have a strong track record of doing it
- You are knowledgeable and passionate about software development (at least 6 years software engineering full-stack, front-end or backend development of websites and applications)
- Experience with agile software development practices.
- Architecting and building full-stack product features
- Good architectural design ability – understand patterns, algorithm complexity, responsibility separation, component-oriented design, data modelling
- Previous experience within a start up or scale up would be advantageous
Bonus
- Experience leading a team in a Team Lead or Engineering Manager role
- Experience in multiple tech stacks and frameworks in a production environment – e.g. Rails, Django, Python, PHP, React, Angular, Vue OR Javascript
Previous experience within a start up or scale up
Who is OfferZen
Over the past 7 years, OfferZen has managed to make a large dent in the South African tech recruitment space and we have recently opened offices in the Netherlands. We are on a mission to help more people thrive in tech - becoming the central place for software makers to build great careers and companies to build winning teams. Our team has grown from 4 to 120+ and we’re looking to add more smart people who want to contribute meaningfully.
What it’s like to work here
We are a fun-loving and very driven team of 120+ people.
We love to do fun stuff together. We are focused on building a connected tribe and a sense of belonging. We value unique and diverse approaches and ensure we create opportunities to share and learn from each other. We have regular online events, show and tells and a book club as well as regional and annual off-site events.
We're dedicated to authenticity. We treat people as people, caring personally and speaking openly. We foster low-ego behaviour - we own our mistakes as well as our victories. We're never about blame. We're always about honesty, learning and continuous improvement. We ensure lots of transparency and visibility. From OKRs and strategy to analytics and company performance numbers, it's all available for you to see and understand.
We're passionate about learning and levelling up. Everyone at OfferZen strives for a growth mindset. We read books, listen to podcasts, share expertise obsessively, then take on hard challenges with smart guidance and support. When things go wrong, we look for the learning and how to improve.
We're good at remote: We are focused on intently creating an exceptional remote working culture for our distributed workforce. Although we have office spaces in Cape Town and Amsterdam, we empower and encourage our team to work remotely. This provides the advantage of flexibility and mobility based on what is most suitable for their lifestyle.