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. Youll 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 looks like
- Youre running (and building) a high performing team that is crushing it.
- Youre 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 theyre working on, why its important and features and systems are getting shipped as expected.
- Theyre 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.
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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
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 and in-person team events, show and tell 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 and has an annual training budget to use to upskill. We have internal book clubs which include free books, listen to podcasts, share expertise obsessively, and then take on hard challenges with smart guidance and support. When things go wrong, we look for learnings and how to improve.
We're all about balance: We believe that maintaining a healthy balance between home and work is the key to feeling happier and more productive.
The OfferZen Story
OfferZen is on a mission to empower developers from across the world to contribute to the future. We believe that great developers are everywhere. And with the right opportunities, they can build an awesome future. The more people building software, the faster we get there. The more diverse the builders, the more awesome it will be.
Over the last 7 years, we have managed to make a large dent in the global online tech recruitment marketplace and we're speeding up. We have a team of 140+ people with offices in both Cape Town and Amsterdam. At 7 years young, we're still in an exciting scale-up phase which allows us to develop new and exciting ideas, innovate our product, and think creatively about solving real problems.
*This role is remote and can be based anywhere in South Africa.
