Engineering Manager (Product)

Job Description

Whereabouts: We are full-remote, global and hours agnostic! Please be aware that many of our team are based in CET. Please be aware you will need to have at least 3 hours of work cross-over with CET and GMT. Read more about our approach to Remote working here.

Interviews: Around 6 hours over a few weeks, including some practical work

Salary: Starting* at £85,000 (€100,000) globally or $140,000 for US candidates.

* We have no “caps” on our salary, and you can read our full compensation philosophy here. If our advertised salary doesn’t suit your current expectations, just let us know and we’re very open to discussing further.

Reporting to: Joel Overton, Director of Engineering

Ask us anything: careers@whereby.com

👀 Your mission at Whereby

As the Engineering Manager for one of our Product teams, your mission is to build, nurture and empower a cross-functional product engineering team at Whereby. You'll work to create a healthy, ambitious and impactful team— where everyone can do their best work, grow in their careers, and be inspired to achieve great things!

📚 What Whereby is all about

Our vision at Whereby is for a world where anywhere works. We're on a mission to create a billion valuable connections by 2025— by making it just as easy to collaborate over video as it is in person.

We're well known for our consumer-facing product, Whereby Meetings, used by millions of participants on a daily basis to meet and collaborate, wherever they are. We also operate Whereby Embedded: a globally-optimised video meetings platform, used by businesses who need to offer video comms in their own products and services.

For our customers, Whereby Embedded is super easy to integrate and low-cost to maintain. We take care of the award-winning meeting experience and global scale, so they can focus on their core business. That could be healthcare, education, events, or any industry that benefits from connecting people.

For our 100+ team members, and also for our customers, we know that decoupling location from work can be life-changing. They can afford the house they want, spend less time commuting, and be where they want to be: closer to nature, to family, or wherever works for them. Everyone on our team enjoys the enormous benefits that a flexible work policy brings, and we truly believe that work — and life — is moving rapidly towards a future where anywhere works.

⛑️ Engineering at Whereby

We're currently 30+ engineers in five cross-functional teams, working in close collaboration with product managers, product designers, and user researchers. We believe in a high-ownership culture, where everyone is empowered to work strategically, drive projects, deeply understand customer problems and find the smartest solutions.

We try to ensure we're building the right thing, but also building the thing right. We dig into the data, talk to the users, prototype, and iterate. As a member of our engineering team you'll take a key role in this process and see your team's work in the hands of millions of users worldwide.

We practice DevOps — the principle that building and operating software are two sides of the same coin. We put care into making sure our systems are operationally healthy, and equip our teams to take a sustainable approach to supporting their code in production.

Engineering Managers at Whereby usually lead and manage a single cross-functional team, staffed with 6–10 engineers of varying seniority — with more senior engineers taking on responsibility for hands-on technical leadership.

Engineers at Whereby tend to be full-stack Web Engineers with a depth of expertise in a particular part of the stack (T-shaped). Our team also includes iOS Engineers, Security Engineers, Data Engineers, and Site Reliability Engineers.

🔍 We're looking for...

We're looking for someone with a technical background who's managed engineers and technical leads. Ideally you'll have experience working in a similar context to ours — driving product-led or sales-led growth through product engineering initiatives.

We believe in everyone

We fundamentally believe talent is distributed to all of us in equal measure. We open our doors (physical or url) to everyone and we see our differences as a strength; it’s this philosophy that drives us towards our mission.

This means we see your unique history as having a value money cannot buy; we believe in the strength of every intersection of race, religion or belief, ethnic origin, different physical ability, family structure, socio-economics, age, nationality or citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity.

⚒️ The nuts and bolts of the role

Please do not see everything in this job ad as "must have", but rather a guiding list of what we're looking for. We know that no candidate will be the perfect match for all we've mentioned in this posting, so don't be afraid to apply if you feel you're close to the brief but not "spot on"

Attributes: You may be just the right person if others have described you as...

• Empathetic and people-centric
• Autonomous
• Open-minded
• Goal-oriented
• Data-informed

Previous Experience: You may be a good fit if you...

• Are comfortable managing 6-10 engineers in a high-ownership, high-growth environment
• Care deeply about building healthy, autonomous teams with clear objectives
• Know what high performance looks like for engineers in Product teams, and have experience hiring software engineers of various kinds
• Get satisfaction from achieving things through others – coaching and helping them grow
• Have some particular wisdom to bring to the role from your own experience building web-based products
• Are an authentic, empathetic relationship-builder with loads of ambition!

🌟 How we'll measure your success

• Your team is setting (and regularly achieving) ambitious goals with tangible business impact
• The engineers you manage are receiving useful feedback and growing in their careers
• Your team is healthy, happy and effective — measurably so
• You're hiring talented and passionate people and making them successful

Strategic responsibilities

• Work with leadership to help connect the product strategy, the technical strategy, and the evolution of the org structure
• Ensure our Product teams have ambitious goals that directly impact company OKRs
• Help develop the hiring strategy for engineers in the Product team
• Work with the People team and other Engineering Managers on the implementation and evolution of our career progression , compensation and performance evaluation frameworks

Tactical responsibilities

• Contribute to a diverse engineering and product culture based on customer-centricity, high-quality code, data-driven decisions, technical innovation and autonomy.
• Build your team: source talented engineers, design and conduct interviews
• Work with other Engineering Managers and Senior Engineers to nurture our engineering culture and processes as we grow
• Work directly with Product Managers and Lead Engineers to ensure teams have the people, skills and resources they need.

Foundational responsibilities

• Support and manage about 8 engineers — through relationship building, 1:1 coaching, goal setting and feedback.
• Work with Product Managers and Lead Engineers to foster effective, healthy, autonomous teams.
• Empower teams by coaching, sharing business context, translating a sense of purpose, clearing tricky blockers and advocating for their needs.

Your progression

You'll report to the Director of Engineering, who'll work with you on your progression — aiming to ensure you're suitably challenged, have effective feedback loops, and are able to do great work whilst learning from it. They'll also help you find training and development opportunities.

We are still growing, and this is likely to give you regular progression opportunities. The two clearest paths are to stay close to a team and focus on leadership within a particular area of deep domain or technical expertise — or to develop towards a Senior Engineering Manager / Director of Engineering by developing your management skillset, cross-organisational impact and your experience managing managers.

In either case, progression is about the scale of the impact you can have. There’s no shortage of opportunity to have an impact at Whereby – on the product, the business, the culture we build, the approach we take to engineering, and on your colleagues.

You've read all this way... you may as well apply! 🙌

If you have any more questions, take a peek at our Recruitment FAQ on Notion or drop us an email to careers@whereby.com. You can always read more about Whereby here on our open handbook.

Note: We perform background checks on certain roles. For more information about how and why we carry out background checks, this document is a great starting point. For anything further, please email careers@whereby.com or your Talent Partner. Whereby’s background checks will be carried out by Zinc.