Engineering Manager

Job Description

At A Glance

Us: Default alive startup of 70+ people. Remote team, mainly based in the UK. YC alumni. Building a web-based platform for behavioural research. £4.4M revenue in 2020, all driven by word-of-mouth.

We’re on a mission to connect people around the world to make trustworthy data more accessible and facilitate world-changing research.

You: Engineering manager with expertise in hiring and growing teams of engineers.

The Role

There are three main aspects to this role: growing our existing engineers, hiring more engineers and further developing our engineering culture.

We value our engineering team and want to see them continuously improve. Every engineer has a personal development budget. We don’t think that’s enough though and want someone to help our engineers grow.

We’ve currently got ~20 engineers and have big ambitions to grow our team throughout 2022. Alongside your engineering manager colleagues, you'll play a critical role in supporting the growth of our teams, and refining our hiring process.

Finally, we’re sensitive to the issues that rapid growth can bring. We want someone to champion our internal engineering culture and continue improving it. We’ve built an environment where engineers feel safe to fail (and learn from doing so). We want that to continue.

How We Operate

Our engineers are split into small multi-discipline teams of 3-7 people (engineers, product designers, UX, product managers). These teams are problem-focused and work on high level objectives, e.g. our Impact Team is looking at ways the site’s UX can be improved to increase retention of users. Each team use 6-12 week cycles to meet the objectives with continuous delivery throughout the cycle.

We have a strong belief in the value of testing - both integration and unit testing. All code goes through code review.

Deep work is valued throughout the company. We favour async communication over Slack and Notion. When we need to communicate in real-time we try to group meetings together to give everyone bigger blocks of interruption-free time.

Our problem-focused teams allow for regular innovation, which we foster further with quarterly hack-days, building things like study debriefing tools and experiments comparing our platform to competitors like MTurk.

Continuous learning and development is strongly encouraged. Everyone gets a personal development budget which they can put towards things like books, courses and conferences, and reserve time every fortnight for learning new things or working on creative side-projects.

We’re aware of the challenges of being a remote worker and work hard to foster team-spirit. We encourage remote chats over coffee with colleagues and have regular team meetings to keep everyone up to date with goings on across the company and introduce new joiners.

We believe that we are in the process of successfully building a company that people enjoy working for. Our employees should feel valued, supported, and fulfilled. We know that there’s always more that we could be doing and have regular conversations about what we can improve. Everyone’s opinion is important and all input is taken on board.

What you'll be doing

• Managing the engineers from 1-2 cross-functional teams with between 3 and 5 engineers in each.
• Working with the engineers and the product team to help the overall teams hit their ambitious goals.
• Supporting the professional development of engineers through regular one-to-ones and continuous feedback.
• Working on continuing to make Prolific a place where exceptional engineers thrive and working with our People Operations team to recruit them.
• Helping engineers make technical decisions. For reference, we use Python, Django and MongoDB on the backend with vue.js on the frontend.

What you'll bring

• Strong software engineering background in scalable applications.
• Experience leading autonomous cross-functional teams.
• Excellent people skills and a supportive, but ambitious leadership style.
• An understanding of how to advance a great engineering culture.

What we offer

• Flexible working: You can work flexibly from home or from our dog-friendly co-working space.
• £1000 home office budget and laptop when you start and a £200 yearly top-up budget.
• 33 days holiday per year (25 days + bank holidays, which you can switch with any day of your choosing).
• Pension (employer contribution 3% of base salary).
• Comprehensive private health insurance that disregards medical history.
• Taxable stipend of £150 a month per person for wellness and improving your remote experience (co-working subscription, gym membership, lunches, etc.)
• £1000 yearly budget for education, growth, and training.
• £1000 yearly budget on discretionary meet-ups (travel, hotel, food, etc.)
• Fun and collaborative quarterly company-wide meet-ups and team socials paid for by us.
• Personal growth opportunities and career progression (e.g., learn about the startup ecosystem, mentoring from executive team, learn about psychological science and research methods).
• Childcare flexibility: Need to pick your child up from school? No problem.
• Generous maternity, paternity, and shared parental leave.
• A company committed to carbon offsetting: we donate money in your name each month to plant trees and we offset travel as an organisation each year.
• Open, transparent, and inclusive culture.

The Company

At Prolific, we're changing how research on the internet is done. Our co-founders Katia and Phelim started by building a marketplace that connects researchers from both Academia and industry with instant, high quality, global research participants. Now, as a growing team, our bigger vision is to build the most powerful and trusted platform for behavioural research.

The Interview Process

Initial Interview - You'll have a 30 - 45 minute interview with two members of the team where you'll have the opportunity to ask about the company and the role, and we'll ask you questions about your experiences and goals.

Assignment - There will be a 2 hour assignment that evaluates skills required for the role. You'll be compensated with a £50 voucher for completing the task because we know your time is valuable!

Final Interview - The final stage is a 1.5 - 2 hour interview where we'll deep dive into your past experiences, goals, motivations, and skills. You'll speak with two to three members of the team and - as always - have an opportunity to ask questions about the role and company.