Flexa
Element • London, United Kingdom

Engineering Manager- Element Web (Worldwide Remote)

Employment type:  Full time

Remote-first

Fully flexible hours

Dog friendly

Job Description

Who we are

Element is the startup which employs the core team behind Matrix— the leading project for secure, open decentralised communication.

Matrix’s mission is to make messaging as open as email— allowing everyone to choose where their data is hosted, enjoy private conversations and ultimately be in control of their own communication.

Practically speaking this means building open, self-sovereign alternatives to WhatsApp/Slack/Teams for governments, civic institutions and communities. At one end of the scale, the French government has adopted Matrix for all of its instant messaging needs, and more recently, we delivered the world’s largest-ever single contract for a collaborative software service helping schools in Germany support remote learning. On the other end of the scale, open source communities such as Mozilla have adopted Element for all of its community chat, replacing IRC.

The Role

You will be a Web Engineering Manager - a highly innovative thinker and leader who will provide engineering management support for the Web App team. This is the core team behind the Element webapp and Electron build, responsible for improving their overall reliability, performance and core user experience.

You will:

  • Grow the team by hiring and onboarding new engineers as the company grows.
  • Shape and communicate the technical strategy for Element Web.
  • Ensure that your engineers are well supported to deliver on their goals, course correcting where necessary.
  • Facilitate technical design sessions, retrospectives, 1:1s etc.
  • Foster collaboration in web engineering best practice across all the web teams at Element.
  • In order to understand the challenges the team faces, you will be expected to contribute code. At the current team size this would mean maybe 20-30% of your time acting as an individual contributor.
  • Take responsibility for the ongoing professional development of your engineers.
  • Act as a point of contact for other areas of the business.
  • Relentlessly remove impediments blocking your team.

The team operates remotely and is currently made up of three engineers, with two more to be hired in the next quarter. We have aggressive hiring plans in 2021, and the role has a lot of potential for growth. Previous remote management experience is not a hard requirement, but those new to it may benefit from being able to regularly spend some time in the London office.

Since (almost) everything we do is open source [1] [2] you can get a great feel for exactly what it would be like to work on Element - joining dev-centric channels such as #element-dev:matrix.org provides a window into the core team and the community. Come and say hi!

Requirements

  • You have experience leading a high-performing team of engineers.
  • You enjoy collaborating with Product Managemers and Product Designers on the product discovery & delivery lifecycle.
  • You are endlessly curious about the technologies your team works with and strive to keep your technical knowledge sharp. It is likely that you have worked as engineer with web technologies in the past, though you must feel comfortable knowing your greatest impact won't be as a technical contributor.
  • You place a tremendous value on good communication and appreciate async- and remote-friendly working practices.
  • You understand methodologies like Agile, XP, and Lean, and see their value, but don't believe there's only one right way to get work done.
  • You have worked as a web developer in the past and have solid experience with React, Typescript, and modern web best practices.
  • You are comfortable with the pace and trade offs of an early stage startup (meaning: know how to take care of yourself and your team, get your work done without working around the clock, prioritise ruthlessly, be able to tolerate a little uncertainty and sometimes wear different hats).

Nice to haves

It would nice if any of the following were true.

  • Some previous history working in an open source environment, either professionally or as a community member.
  • You have worked as a developer on a complex react base web application in the past. We don’t need you to have worked on a chat application, but familiarity with common real time patterns and idioms would be a plus.
  • An interest/experience in the world of decentralised technology and/or messaging technology.
  • You have managed remote staff or have worked remotely yourself. Element is a highly distributed organisation and we continually strive to improve our remote experience.

If you have any questions before making an application reach out to our Talent Partner Mischa (@mischawalmsley:matrix.org) via https://app.element.io

Benefits

Our general approach is to treat people like adults and acknowledge that by being flexible we create an environment for people to do their best work. For more details here is our manifesto.

That said specific points that differentiate us.

  • Work (almost) full time on FOSS projects with high visibility and a large enthusiastic community
  • The chance to work with large scale governmental installations through to high profile FOSS projects such as Mozilla or KDE.
  • Option to work partially or fully remote (our head office is in London), we offer flexibility and consider ourselves to be a family friendly environment.
  • People tend to stay with the company for a long time, we take this as a sign that we have a cohesive supportive culture, that we have engaging challenging work and that people can develop their skills and careers here for the long term.

Element does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, colour, religion, age, national origin, marital status, disability, veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other reason prohibited by law in provision of employment opportunities and benefits.

Company benefits

Open to part-time employees
Open to job sharing
Sabbaticals
Work from anywhere scheme
Enhanced sick pay
Pregnancy loss leave

The FlexScore® is the result of a rigorous 2-step verification of a company’s flexibility

First we assess the flexibility options Element provides and then we anonymously survey a statistically significant proportion of their employees to make sure Element is as flexible as they say they are. Our assessment is based on the six key elements of flexibility: location, hours, autonomy, benefits, role modelling and work-life balance.

We ask the hard questions so you don’t have to.

Working at Element

Company employees

115

Gender diversity (male:female:non-binary)

83:16:1

Office locations

London, UK and Rennes, France

Funding levels

$48,100,000

Hiring Countries

France
United Kingdom

Awards & Achievements

Saas & Dev Software

Saas & Dev Software

Industry awards 2022