Job Description

This role has three dimensions: leading engineers, working closely with a Product Manager and Designer as a “product trio", and collaborating with other engineering leaders on common needs and shared concerns.

You will be deeply involved in the technical details of your team’s work - to assist or unblock them, challenge them, and help them improve both individually and as a team.

Your leadership responsibilities will generally require about two thirds of your time and attention; the remainder will be spent as a hands-on contributor in development and/or testing.

WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING

Engineering leadership:

• Support and manage a team of 3-5 software engineers
• Guide architecture, design, data modelling, and implementation choices within your team
• Set them on a trajectory of continuous improvement - in technical practices, delivery processes, and systems thinking
• Create a healthy and cohesive team culture, with high engagement, a strong sense of shared ownership, and the ability to mostly self-organize without relying on your directives
• Involve engineers in discovery, and ensure they understand, internalize and apply the “why” of what they’re working on
• Help each of the engineers improve their craft and grow in their careers, keep them motivated, and provide frequent informal feedback and semi-annual reviews

Work closely as part of a trio with the team’s Product Manager and Designer to …

• Discover and understand the needs of your customers
• Experiment with different ways to fulfill those needs to identify which are most effective and engaging - and which make them want to come back for more
• Assess feasibility, costs, risks and technical challenges of different opportunities and solutions early in the process, and take them into account when deciding which ones to pursue
• Challenge ideas constructively, pushing back on opportunities and solutions that are too costly or risky - and proposing simpler alternatives
• Break down large features and initiatives into smaller steps for incremental delivery of user value, fast feedback cycles, and adjusting or pivoting as we learn
• Maintain a healthy balance between building new capabilities/enhancements and maintaining the health of the existing product - in both its functional and technical aspects
• Share accountability for outcomes, not just output

Collaborate with other Tech Leads and Engineering Managers on:

• Technical choices, practices and processes which affect multiple teams
• Boundaries and dependencies between teams and their systems - including domain modelling, API definitions, information flows, and composable UIs
• Improving the way we use infrastructure, CI/CD, test automation, AI assistants and agents, and other tools for development, testing, trouble-shooting and security
• Hiring
• Engineering culture
• Ensuring that for each subsystem within the product, we have clarity on which team is responsible for maintaining it, supporting it, and serving as the stewards of its evolution and long-term health

WHAT YOU BRING TO THE TABLE

• 7+ years of hands-on experience in product engineering
• Strong fundamentals in software architecture, design, development, testing and production support
• Excellence in identifying trade-offs and opportunities for improvement, and good judgment in navigating them - both in products themselves and in the way your team works on them
• Experience with experimentation, incremental delivery and tight feedback loops, where user behaviour plays a major role in shaping the evolution of the product
• Ability to keep the big picture in mind while working in the weeds - and pay close attention to low-level details while working on the big picture
• Track record of fostering and facilitating collaboration, excellence and alignment with both engineers and cross-functional peers; mentoring engineers; and giving constructive feedback
• Excellent communication, leadership, organizational and problem-solving skills
• Ability to bridge divides and create shared understanding among engineers, product managers, designers and customer-facing teams

IN A PERFECT WORLD, YOU HAVE EXPERIENCE IN MANY OF THE FOLLOWING

• A tech lead or engineering manager role where you were a full-time enabler and force-multiplier (as opposed to one where you were also doing hands-on development work)
• Cloud-based distributed systems
• Many/most of the specific technologies we use: TypeScript, Node.js, React, React Native, Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, AWS, K8s, Terraform, PHP/Laravel
• Wrangling messy legacy systems, and step-wise techniques for evolving and/or replacing them
• SaaS products which serve the needs of both small businesses and consumers
• Marketplace products which balance the needs of a variety of market participants while ensuring that all of them are getting a good deal
• Helping your team work through uncertainty and ambiguity, and bringing clarity to complex, fast-changing situations
• Identifying and navigating trade-offs between short-term and long-term needs, and between functional requirements, technical health, and business needs
• Ensuring security, data privacy and compliance with Ontario legal requirements for accessibility, data privacy, payments and CASL