Position: Engineering Manager
Company: Super Dispatch
Category: Lead
Experience required: 5y
English level: fluent
Published: 2022-01-01T00:00:00+02:00

**About the Role**
The Engineering Manager will be responsible for managing a team of 5-10 direct reports (engineers and team leads), as well as growing the Super Dispatch products used by dispatchers and drivers in the United States car hauling industry.

In this role, you'll be working closely with colleagues across Growth, Operations, Engineering, Data Science, Product, Design, Sales, and Marketing to bring your ideas to life.

Your main responsibility areas include people management, team execution and business value delivery, and technical leadership. As an experienced technical leader, and with the help of tech leads in your team, you will own the technical and process responsibilities within the Carrier team.

Your manager will onboard you and will work closely with you through mentorship and coaching. During the onboarding process, together with your manager, you will define what success looks like for you, and together, you will build your 3-6-12-month plan based on that.

We believe that great managers get involved just enough to make sure their teams are executing effectively and their reports are growing quickly—and then they get out of the way and empower their teams to own as much responsibility as possible.

**What You'll Do**
You'll manage a full-stack team of 5-10 engineers that own the dispatcher and driver experiences that include feature sets such as load discovery and acquisition, dispatching, vehicle inspection, billing, and reporting.

You will collaborate with leadership to create and communicate the vision, high-level roadmap, and technical strategy for your team, ensuring every engineer understands how their project contributes to the company goals. You will set the direction for your engineering team, anticipate strategic and scaling-related challenges via long-term planning.

Most of what you'll do can be divided into the following 3 categories.

**You will manage people:**
- Coach and mentor.
- Conduct regular 1-on-1s.
- Guide career growth and provide development opportunities.
- Conduct regular performance reviews.
- Delegate responsibilities.
- Help build a healthy and collaborative culture rewarding strategic failure as well as success.
- Ensure team health and knowledge sharing.
- Identify the headcount needs of your team.
- Identify technical skills gaps for recruitment and upskilling current team members.
- Plan and execute the recruitment efforts for your team.
- Onboard new hires or new team members.

**You will manage team execution and delivery:**
- You will work with a product manager and the team to draft and distribute well-written requirements into reasonably sized cards. You will define periodic delivery milestones within engineering resource and business requirement constraints. You will validate that the deliverables are meeting product and business requirements before they are released.
- You will track the team’s efficiency and quality of deliverables at SDLC and regularly adjust processes and timelines to ensure high quality is delivered.
- You will identify bottlenecks in the process and roadblocks to success for your team and clear these roadblocks.
- You will monitor execution and delivery for the engineering team, identifying risks and solutions, and driving improvements.
- You will ensure alignment across teams.

**You will provide technical leadership:**
- You will own a large responsibility for producing software that is highly available, monitorable, and maintainable over time.
- When needed, you will be hands-on in the software development process. You will spend less time writing code, but you will be willing to get your hands dirty to help your team achieve their goals. You will set a high standard on coding, testing, deployment, and monitoring.
- You will be expected to understand what the team is doing, the details, and the trade-offs the team is making, even if you are not necessarily doing the code reviews or writing the code.
- You will act as a leader for the technical roadmap of your team.
- You will identify areas of strategic technical debt, do the cost/benefit analysis for resolving this debt, and communicate suggested timelines for prioritizing this to the management team.

**Competencies**
If you consider yourself an eager learner, a conscientious worker, and a thoughtful, kind, supportive human, you might just thrive at Super Dispatch.

To be successful, you will need a combination of problem-solving, technical, and communication skills. We expect you are:

Proactive - you act without being told what to do. You bring new ideas to the company.
Flexible / Adaptable - you adjust quickly to changing priorities and conditions. You cope effectively with complexity and change.
Move fast - you execute quickly and get things done.
Growth driven - you seek growth in learning, efficiency, and celebrate wins.
Customer focus - you are truth-seeking individuals who can empathize with customers. You patiently listen and take feedback to solve problems for customers.
Communication - You can comfortably communicate in English (speaking and writing). You are able to share knowledge and experience with team members via documentation.

**As a manager:**

You are comfortable managing team members with different skill sets from your own.
You can communicate expectations clearly to all team members, solicit and deliver individual feedback frequently (not just in the scope of review periods).
You have the ability to run effective 1-on-1s, group discussions, planning sessions, and retrospectives.
You are capable of identifying the most high-value projects and keeping your team focused on these projects.
You can prioritize, create alignment, and provide clarity. Beyond being autonomous and guiding your team, you take ownership of problems that you see across the organization, even if they are beyond your defined responsibilities.
You can develop processes and remove hurdles to facilitate great and fast execution by your team.
You have a high tolerance for ambiguity and change, especially around organizational structure and the boundaries of your role. You enjoy jumping into whatever areas need attention and learning as-you-go.
You are able to make decisions in the presence of ambiguity to create clarity for your reports and teams.
You value empathetic and direct communication, particularly when giving and receiving feedback.
You have expertise and interest in growing teams: interviewing junior and senior engineers, collaborating with a recruiting team, smoothly onboarding new team members.
You have strong data-driven prioritization skills and you are unafraid to say no to any level of authority, when things don't look right.
You have the ability to make sound "code quality vs speed of development" trade-offs.

**Minimum requirements**
You have Advanced-level English skills, especially Speaking and Writing.
You have at least 2 years of experience managing a team of 5-15 people (full-stack, backend, mobile), across various technologies.
You have managed process and organizational design improvements, and hired and supported successful teams.
You have demonstrated experience in Lean/Agile management practices.
You have delivered several large projects (in the context of your team) successfully in the past 3 years.
You have 5+ years of experience developing software as an IC engineer.
You have a strong technical background as a Senior Engineer for at least 3 years on the web backend written in Python, Ruby, Java, or a similar high-level programming language.
As a manager, you’ll provide daily guidance to people whose job is to build software and solve technical problems.
It’s crucial that you’re able to recognize bad patterns and help your team avoid them. We expect managers to identify areas in which their teams need technical guidance, and either provide it themselves or find help from experts outside the team. They should also be able to ask detailed questions to guide their team to good solutions.
We are looking for engineering managers who are experienced engineers, and when presented with a problem can quickly identify and focus on the difficult parts. We want to see candidates recognize where complexities might arise in their design, and what parts of their solution might break at scale.

**Plus points**
You have managed engineering teams at startups before, particularly during periods of rapid growth and organizational change.
You have experience rolling out engineering and management practices and processes—e.g., code review, performance reviews, and levels and ladders—where they didn't exist before.
You've managed teams that are partially (or entirely) remote.
Significant experience in designing and operating critical systems.