| Engineering Manager |  |
Feb 25, 2022🔗 👁️ 292 292 Views
🏢 Flowhub 📍 Remote✨Remote OK
💰 $130,000 - $160,000 🗓️ Full-time 🏷️ Information Technology 📛 No license required
About our company
At Flowhub, we're about more than technology — we're on a mission to make legal cannabis accessible to everyone. Founded in 2015, Flowhub pioneered the first Metrc API integration to help dispensaries stay compliant. Today, over 1,000 dispensaries trust Flowhub's point of sale, inventory management, business intelligence, and mobile solutions to process $3B+ cannabis sales annually.
Flowhub creates user-friendly business management and compliance products that increase revenue in the highly regulated cannabis industry. Our Engineering department is highly creative, incredibly resourceful, and obsesses over the user experience.
Job description
An engineering manager is responsible for leading at least one sprint team (4-8 engineers, potentially QA). They are responsible for the outcomes of that team, as well as taking ownership of the technical quality of the systems owned by that team.
As an engineering manager grows in their role, they will delegate more responsibility for the day-to-day management of the team to another team lead. Successfully running more than one sprint team is a signal of readiness to be considered for Senior Engineering Manager.
Culture & Team Building
An engineering manager’s primary responsibility is their people - making sure they’ve got the right group of people, they are properly motivated, and have the right skillset to tackle the challenges they face.
- Contributes thoughtfully to the hiring process, strong interviewer, good sales-person for Flowhub.
- Great coach for their team - knows how to motivate each individual according to their own unique needs. Pushes people when they need to be pushed, supports people when they need to be supported.
- Helps each person on their team understand their performance relative to the company’s expectations, no surprises at review time.
- Uses their position to amplify the voices of people on their teams or around the company that may not otherwise be heard.
- Creates an environment where people enjoy coming to work.
- Advocates to move their people into different roles if necessary for the company or the individual.
- Works with adjacent engineering teams, product teams, and stakeholders in a respectful, thoughtful way to make sure their team’s priorities are well understood.
- Manages conflict in an empathetic way, ensuring everyone is heard and that a decision is reached and communicated.
- Ensures everyone is allowed to bring their authentic selves to work every day.
Critical Thinking
Engineering managers are responsible for the systems that their team owns, including stability, architecture, development velocity, and observability/monitoring. The engineering manager of a team works with their product counterpart and technical leaders on their team to advocate for addressing technical debt, and to help explain trade offs of delivering a project quickly or investing more into the overall technical health of the system.
Engineering managers use their understanding of the product, their customers, and Flowhub’s overall business needs to make sure their team is working on the highest priority projects at all times. They are unafraid to stop a project if it's no longer valuable, and they make sure work is carved up into small, measurable deliverables to ensure we’re on the right track.
- The engineering manager’s team should be flexible in the face of new information - when the team or the business learns something new, the strategy should be adapted to ensure we’re still working on the highest priority work.
- Projects should be designed to deliver value / learning quickly, with smart increments that will help determine if the project is worth continued investment.
- Systems that are owned by the engineering manager should be moving towards operational maturity - easy to deploy, easy to monitor, well tested, and notifies the team when there are problems.
- The engineering manager ensures the team is balancing long term vision with short term wins in a pragmatic way in technical decision making.
- Flowhub engineering teams should be smart about learning from failure - the engineering manager should ensure that any high severity issues are root caused properly and that we don’t fail the same way twice.
- Makes decisions in Flowhub’s best interest, not just localized to their team.
Outcomes / Results
A team’s engineering manager helps to set the guideposts for the team, sets up their working arrangements and processes, hires and coaches the individuals on the team, and has responsibility for prioritization of impactful work. The engineering manager is also responsible for blocking and tackling for their team to ensure they are not distracted or prevented from completing their work efficiently.
- Results can be measured in many ways, and the engineering manager should work with their manager and their product person to ensure that their intended outcomes are well understood and can be measured.
- The engineering manager’s team should be able to produce value for Flowhub relative to the size, tenure, and seniority of the team
- Value can come in many forms - learning, developer velocity, additional sales, reduced costs.
- Work that the team is doing should be connected to higher level business goals, and the team should understand how what they’re working on fits into Flowhub’s longer plan.
- When the team is stuck and not making progress, the engineering manager should work fearlessly with the team to get them delivering again.
Communication
Engineering managers help connect the organization to the work their team is doing, and help connect their team to Flowhub’s wider strategy. They ensure the entire organization is aligned through writing and speaking.
- Writes and speaks with clarity, tailoring their message to the audience to ensure everyone understands.
- Ensures their team is not a silo by encouraging cross team collaboration and sharing.
- Champions their team members through the organization to make sure they get the recognition they deserve.
- Steers into conflict respectfully to reach a resolution.
- Ensures team meetings are well run and effective uses of everyone’s time.
- Communicates team goals and outcomes upwards and across through the organization.
- Translates business strategy and organizational change to their team.
- Prioritizes their time to make sure they are available for their team.