Director of Engineering

Job Description

About the role

As Director of Engineering, you’ll immediately have significant ownership over engineering team planning, processes, and growth. You will work closely with our president and leadership team on product strategy and execution.

You will:

• Manage an engineering organization to be productive, happy, and well-utilized.
  
• Develop a deep understanding of our product and users and work with cross-functional stakeholders to build an excellent product that empowers organizations and supporters.
  
• Develop a deep understanding of our codebase and stack and work with the engineering team to create a product that is secure, stable, performant, and cost-effective.
  
• Contribute to technical planning, standards, and decision-making at all levels.
  
• Set culture and process for the team to ensure we’re inclusive, effective, and enjoying ourselves.
  
• Empower the team to be cross-functionally effective and work with engineering and other departments to ensure good communication.
  
• Grow the team by hiring excellent new engineers.
  
• Contribute to product planning at every level by scoping, speccing, prioritizing, and communicating consequences of decisions.
  

What you’ll need to succeed:

• You care deeply about empowering ordinary people for progressive causes. We’re a mission-driven company, and everything we do is guided by impact. At the end of the day, we’re here to make a difference.
  
• You have strong technical skills, including the ability to reason through different approaches, write high quality code in a reasonable timeframe, explain tradeoffs, debug your and others’ code, and adjust to changing requirements.
  
• You’re flexible and able to anticipate change.
  
• You’re a team player. You’re not afraid to pick up whitespace work that’s needed for a project to succeed.
  
• You take initiative to raise and solve problems to make the team stronger going forward.
  
• You’re an eager and fast learner, undaunted by tackling a project in a totally new technology or part of the stack.
  
• You care deeply about the people you work with, and are good at finding ways to help people grow
  

Hard minimum requirements:

• You have prior experience managing programmers.
  

Our Technology

We’re including this list only to be helpful and informative. We do not expect familiarity with any particular technology in the interview process or before starting the job. As long as you’re strong in programming fundamentals and excited to learn new technologies, you’re a good candidate! Our tech stack is:

• Python (Django) backend
  
• React frontend
  
• PostgreSQL database hosted on Amazon Aurora
  
• AWS for all sorts of goodies including hosting servers
  
• Algolia for search and discovery
  
• Celery for offline task management
  
• Github for version control
  
• Docker for package management
  
• 3rd party tools such as CircleCI, Twilio, Mandrill, Datadog, Cloudflare, and a bunch of others