Position: Engineering Director
Company: Quarry Design Group
Category: Lead
Experience required: 5y
English level: fluent
Published: 2023-03-01T00:00:00+02:00

We are a small web technology firm seeking an engineering director to provide leadership to our engineering team and the organization at large while taking complete ownership of the following engineering efforts

Key Qualifications

- Proficient experience with Magento
- Significant DevOps and systems architecture experience
- Past agency experience is *highly* preferred
- Comfortable producing thorough, high-accuracy engineering estimates that are met consistently
- Experience leading an engineering team and providing mentorship to other engineers
- 8+ years of general, fullstack software engineering experience
- Keen ability to translate complex, technical concepts to easily understandable “layman” descriptions

Description

We are a small web technology firm seeking an engineering director to provide leadership to our engineering team and the organization at large while taking complete ownership of the following engineering efforts:

- Day-to-day engineering and technology operations
- Mentorship and support of the engineering team
- High-risk, high-complexity engineering tasks
- Working with our Project Director to groom incoming engineering asks from clients
- Improve the quality and efficiency of engineering and technology outcomes
- Ensure the quality of all code that is shipped
- Engineering estimates
- Architecture
- Client consultation and support
- Interfacing and coordinating with client technical stakeholders
- Growth of the engineering and technology services business vertical
- Risk mitigation within engineering and technology services business vertical

Our Engineering Director role is a leadership-level role that is responsible for all aspects of our engineering and technology services business vertical. The ideal candidate for this role is someone with deep and broad web software engineering experience who is passionate about crafting the highest-quality engineering outcomes within the parameters of existing business requirements and budgets.

Leadership positions at our organization require a high degree of autonomy. That means that, given a thorough understanding of the role's responsibilities and our organization's business requirements, you should be comfortable—excited even—to autonomously fulfill the responsibilities of the role with little-to-no direct management. This role reports horizontally to leadership team peers, and vertically to our Principal. Otherwise, you are free to achieve high-quality outcomes however you deem best, as well as to pitch new ideas for growth and improvement to the rest of the leadership team. **If you are an individual who is passionate about crafting high-quality technology and growing businesses, this role will be a *****great***** fit for you.**

The role is responsible for collaborating with, managing, leading, supporting, and mentoring our engineering team with all members of that team reporting to you. You would be responsible for working with and guiding the team in achieving high-quality outcomes and successfully shipping code for all of our client projects/products on time and within budget.

Strategy and architecture are both critical aspects of this role. The role requires someone with keen experience in translating and marrying business cases and requirements with software architecture design and outcomes. The role requires a nimble ability to speak each of those two “languages” both internally and externally with clients.

Communication ability is an important part of this role. The role requires eloquent and precise communication both internally to other members of the org and externally to clients. A significant aspect of the role is translating complex, technical concepts into easily understandable descriptions in laymen's terms. Whether that is with other, non-technical members of the organization, or with client stakeholders. The Engineering Director shows up for our clients as something of a fractional CTO. Our clients are able to benefit from the leadership and guidance of our Engineering Director as a value-add to working with us if that is a capacity that they do not currently have in-house.

Estimation and grooming of engineering asks is another important aspect of the role. The Engineering Director frequently handles this work directly with the support of our Project Director and is otherwise responsible for reviewing, signing off on, and approving cases that are handled by other members of the org—an important step in ensuring the quality of outcomes. Part of this is ensuring that work estimates are at least met or, more ideally, we are shipping under estimate. A very important value for us is ensuring that we *rarely* overrun estimates. If it does happen, it should only be for a legitimate reason and there should be a conversation with the client beforehand. This is important as it empowers our clients to make highly informed business decisions around design, technology, data, etc, and to be able to depend on us as a reliable, and consistent partner.

As mentioned, the Engineering Director works very closely with the Project Director. The Project Director is the main point of contact for all client stakeholders, and all work flows through them, both in and out. They are also responsible for all functional PM. The Project Director would work closely with the Engineering Director for scrum, capacity planning, etc of all engineering work.

We have an hourly billing business model that is quite straightforward and simple, and the Engineering Director role is a primarily billable position, which means that the majority of the role's time is, and should be, billable to client projects. Given our size and business model, this is quite simple, but it is important to note for expectations. This is ***not*** a salaried position with no connection to revenue.

Primary stacks, technologies, and vendors that we work with

- JAM
- LAMP
- LEMP
- Magento
- Next.js
- React
- WordPress
- Laravel
- CorePHP
- Zend
- Vue
- Digital Ocean
- AWS
- Vercel
- Nexcess
- Apache
- nginx
- Klaviyo
- Shopify
- Tailwind
- Bitbucket
- Google Tag Manager
- Google Cloud Platform
- Cloudflare

Role responsibilities

- Organizational leadership and strategy
- Engineering team management, support, and mentorship
- Handling of high-risk, high-complexity engineering and devops tasks
- Client consultation and support
- Coordinate systems architecture and technology ops with technical client stakeholders
- Engineering estimates
- Engineering grooming
- Systems architecture
- Business strategy (financial, operational, growth, resiliency, etc)
- Design, measure, and report on engineering and technology KPIs and OKRs
- Propose initiatives to improve engineering and technology outcomes
- Ensure that all technology is adhering to current best practices, if not exceeding them
- Pre-sales meetings with clients
- Client consulting and support
- Develop and maintain documentation for all technology systems and processes
- Ensure the highest quality service level for all clients
- Mitigate defects, downtime, and other risks in all client technology products that we service
- Ensure that engineering efforts are meeting timelines and promise dates, and staying within budget/estimate parameters

Benefits

This role is approximately full-time on an hourly contract basis, and is 100% remote as we are a fully-distributed organization.

Benefits include 

- Fully flexible work hours (work when you want to)
- Education stipend
- Equipment stipend
- Relaxation stipend
- Profit sharing

Who We Are

We are a small web technology firm offering full-service UIX design, fullstack engineering, data collection, product management, growth strategy, content strategy and production, email marketing, visual design, and everything in between. Put simply, we support every step of a web product's lifecycle.

With the fast-paced environment of continuous design, architecture, engineering, shipping, and growth of a variety of web products, for the right candidate, this role could represent a highly engaging and rewarding opportunity to play in an established and fun sandbox, if we do say so ourselves. 😉

In order to serve a range of clients creatively, Quarry has intentionally built an inclusive team. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences. Not merely because it is the right thing to do, but because it makes us better. If you share our values and enthusiasm for excellent technology and diversity, please consider joining us.

People are a part of this team because of their expertise. The best outcomes are based on trust, and for that reason, we are committed to clear communication through setting expectations, transparency, and making agreements. We are not interested in micro-managing. Our company culture is upbeat, open-minded, and solution-oriented. We value individual opinions, strengths, and talents.

#Tech Mentorship Program

We have an organizational goal of launching a technology sector mentorship program in the near future. We are motivated to do what we can to increase the diversity of the technology industry and provide opportunities for career paths in tech to diverse candidates. We mention this as if this is something that is interesting to you, our Engineering Director role would play a significant part in designing, implementing, and maintaining that program.

# How to Apply

If you are still reading, you feel that you fit this description, and are interested in joining our team, please send:

- A unique cover letter that describes how you match the characteristics and skills described along with experience to support this. Please no copy/paste cover letters, and your cover letter does not need to be drawn out, just thoughtful and unique. This is an important screening step.
- Answer the following questions which are important screening steps in the hiring process for this position
    — Name three questions, concerns, or comments about the role that you have after reading the job description
    — Briefly describe what you feel is the most successful culture for an engineering team to have
    — Briefly describe your favorite project that you have worked on
    — Briefly describe a project you have worked on that went sideways while explaining what went wrong, and how the outcome was salvaged
    — Do you have prior experience at an agency? If so, please briefly describe it
- Be prepared to provide references