Responsibilities
- Work with Product to turn requirements into well-scoped, sequenced work; set and hold delivery milestones.
- Track team health at each stage of the SDLC; unblock bottlenecks and adjust process as needed.
- Keep your team aligned with other Engineering squads.
- Communicate roadmap, trade-offs, and risk clearly to Product, Design, and other stakeholders — assessed in the panel interview, and day-to-day through cross-team syncs and written updates.
- Set a technical vision tied to company goals and plan ahead for scale — assessed via a roadmap exercise in the interview, and day-to-day through your quarterly OKRs.
- Own the team's technical roadmap, including strategic tech debt — identify it, size the cost/benefit, and drive prioritization.
- Stay close enough to the code (Java/Spring Boot, Hibernate, RabbitMQ) to ask the right questions, catch bad patterns early, and weigh in on system design and scaling trade-offs — without being the primary code reviewer. In practice: review architecture docs, join incident RCAs for production issues, and run periodic tech-debt reviews for the Shipper TMS backend.
- Set the bar for engineering quality standards: a PR review checklist and minimum test coverage for new code, a rollback plan required before any deploy, and active upkeep of monitoring dashboards and alerts — tuning thresholds and adding new alerts as the system evolves instead of letting them go stale.
- Run regular 1:1s, coaching, and performance reviews; guide career growth and delegate ownership.
- Own headcount planning, hiring, and onboarding for your team.
- Track and improve engineer velocity and quality.
Requirements
- Advanced-level English skills, especially Speaking and Writing.
- At least 3 years of experience managing a team of 5-15 people (full-stack, backend, mobile), across various technologies.
- Demonstrated experience in Lean/Agile management practices.
- Delivered several large projects (in the context of your team) successfully in the past 3 years.
- 5+ years of experience developing software as an IC engineer.
- Strong technical background as a Senior Engineer for at least 3 years on the web backend written in Java/Spring (or a comparable high-level backend stack).
Nice to Have
- Managed engineering teams at startups before, particularly during periods of rapid growth and organizational change.
- 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.
- Managed teams that are partially (or entirely) remote.
- Significant experience in designing and operating critical systems.
- Experience reviewing high-risk PRs (schema migrations, message contracts, query performance) across teams.
- Hands-on experience working with Metabase and Datadog.
Benefits
- Great Culture - We strive for transparency and you’ll work with like minded highly motivated people excited about solving complex problems
- Remote First Culture - We’re a 100% distributed team!
- Gym/Wellness Stipend - We provide a monthly stipend for gym memberships ($50/month)
- Generous Time Off Flex PTO policy so you can take the time you need, when you need it, as well as 6 weeks paid paternity leave
- Great gear – we’ll set you up for success with the right tech and help you outfit your home office, if needed.
Work Arrangement
Remote (Worldwide)
Additional Information
- Location Requirement: We’re especially interested in candidates located in Eastern European or Central Asian regions.
