Engineering Manager
About the Company
Relay Commerce is an e-commerce enablement platform offering scaling solutions across personalized messaging, social commerce, and customer retention, helping merchants navigate the rapidly evolving digital landscape with a comprehensive suite of tools. The Relay suite of solutions currently drives more than $1 billion in aggregate incremental gross merchandise volume for more than 35,000 merchants.
The Relay ecosystem currently consists of eight software products that accelerate merchant revenue growth through email marketing automation, on-page conversion optimization, user generated content management, retention analytics, and subscription management. Relay’s suite of products are established as key revenue generation tools for innovative e-commerce merchants worldwide.
About the Role
Engineering Managers at Relay are accountable for the technical and delivery output of the engineering teams they help run. The role is split into three pillars; people, product and technical leadership.
Collaborating widely with all appropriate stakeholders, you will help our teams ship great work that really matters to our customers, to a high technical standard.
Engineering Managers must be exceptional technical communicators; you must be able to understand, articulate and explore potential features and technical challenges.
Primary Responsibilities
- Being accountable for delivery across the teams that you manage; ensuring teams are working at an effective, sustainable pace.
- Ensuring that your team members are performing at (or reach) a high bar of technical ability. You are accountable for the performance and growth of the engineers on your teams.
- Partner with both product and technical team members to help define, communicate and prioritize upcoming work. This involves a lot of communication and technical writing.
- Lead two teams of between 6-10 engineers in total, and support, coach and develop them with regular 1:1’s and continuous feedback.
- Remember the human; realize each team member has their own perspectives, needs, wants, challenges and frustrations. Work to understand them - and help them grow - as individuals.
- Maintain your technical knowledge; although you will never be working in the “line of delivery”, you should plan to spend 10-20% of your time working on technical tasks on the products that you oversee.
- Provide actionable insights into how to approach larger technical tasks – although you defer to team members first.
- Partner with the Head of Engineering; working closely with them to deliver company-wide policies, objectives, processes and standards.
Important Traits for Success
- Comfortable with ambiguity; larger objectives rarely start fully-formed. You will have a high degree of autonomy to help us clearly define those objectives.
- Team-oriented; You measure your success by the achievements and growth of those you lead. You “play well with others”. You trust your team to solve problems; you give clear guidance and then “let go of the vine” and let them deliver.
- Strategic thinker; You can balance immediate needs with a long-term vision, ensuring sustainable product growth.
- Outcome-focused; You assess outcomes, not processes. You guide teams towards making the highest impact.
- Strong sense of ownership; You do what needs to be done for success; you take pride in your work and are committed to delivering high-quality, impactful solutions.
Required Expertise
- You are expected to have recently worked in a hands-on role at a senior level. Whilst you will not be working on features or bugs off a teams backlog (i.e. not part of their velocity), you are expected to develop and maintain a high level of technical knowledge about the applications your team members work on.
Technical
- Significant, proven, senior-level experience with full-stack JavaScript frameworks, working across both frontend and backend systems. Our guidance is 7+ years at senior level.
- Strong experience with PostgreSQL, MySQL or other RDBMS.
- Experience with observability tools, their value and how best to use them e.g. using the Golden Signals.
- Previous experience working in e-commerce.
- Highly desirable: Experience running containers on AWS/GCP (and experience with cloud infrastructure platforms as a whole).
- Highly desirable: Experience with e-commerce marketplaces such as Shopify and WooCommerce.
Leadership
- Proven experience growing, leading and managing engineering team members.
- Able to provide input on, understand and challenge engineering decisions.
- Natural ability to inspire and motivate a team.
Product
- Delivery experience; you have defined and shipped major initiatives as part of a team.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills; you can write clear and succinct explanations of technical topics for a variety of audiences.
Education
- Highly desirable: Bachelors or Masters degree
The Interview Process
- Initial call (30 minutes). You’ll speak with our People team, who will ask about your previous roles & experience leading engineering team members. They’ll be able to help you understand Relay as a company, too, and check you meet our minimum requirements.
- First round (30 minutes) - You’ll speak with the Head of Engineering, briefly discussing your previous roles and experience again. They’ll be interested to hear examples from your previous experience about how you’ve shaped the products you’ve worked on, and how you’ve shipped complex things.
- Technical assessment (variable, and up to you) - We would like you to demonstrate your senior level of technical experience; we do have a take home assessment, which is our default for all engineering team members at Relay - but you tell us how you would like us to assess you here.
- Second round(1 hour) - You’ll meet with our Chief Technology Officer and Head of Engineering, and discuss your technical assessment first (we might even ask you how you prefer to assess engineering ability during interviews!) and then move on to more specific questions about your skills and experience in technical areas.
- Third round (1 hour) - You’ll meet with our Chief Executive Officer, Ricardo Hinds, who (at present) leads our Product function across all Relay BU’s - and perhaps another leadership team member. They will focus primarily on your ability to set teams up with clear guidance on what to build (and why it’s important), but you should expect other, more general questions here too.
a) Providing us code samples / open source work you’ve done in the past is an option, as is a live pairing exercise on a call, using your tools, environment and language.
Benefits & Perks
- Work From Home Stipend
- Therapy/Mental Health Reimbursement
- Paid Parental Leave
- Flexible Time Off
- Annual Company Offsite
- Co-working Space Allowance
- Company Swag
Relay Commerce is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all team members.
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