Engineering Manager

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

Reporting to the Head of Engineering Management you will lead and provide engineering management support to Engineering teams at Element.

More concretely you will:-

• Take responsibility for the overall effectiveness of engineering delivery for your team/s.
• Shape and communicate the technical strategy for your area.
• Partner with your peers in the Product and Design organisations to ensure strong alignment between your team’s goals and the broader company strategy.
• Ensure that your engineers are well supported to deliver on their goals, course-correcting where necessary.
• Facilitate technical design sessions, retrospectives, 1:1s etc.
• 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 10-20% of your time acting as an individual contributor.
• Take responsibility for the ongoing professional development of your engineers.
• Contribute to the hiring strategy and participate in interviews and hiring decisions.
• Act as a point of contact for other areas of the business.
• Relentlessly remove impediments blocking your team.

The team operates remotely in predominantly European locations. We have aggressive hiring plans in 2021/22 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, including managing and shipping cross-functional or multi-team projects.
• You enjoy collaborating with Product Management, Technical Account Management and UX Design 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. While there is a hands-on component to the role, you must feel comfortable knowing your greatest impact won't be as a technical contributor.
• Earlier in your career, you have previously worked as a developer on a complex end user-facing application. 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.
• 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 do not believe that there is ’one true way’ to get work done.
• 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 based 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 Adam (@adamt:element.io) via https://app.element.io

Benefits

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. We also have a family friendly environment, many of the team have small children and we look to accommodate that as best we can. Since our technology is relevant to anything that requires real-time comms, the role provides exposure to a wide range of domains from web and app dev through to VR, VoIP and IoT.

Our package generally contains:

• Private Health Insurance
• Pension
• Annual Bonus
• Share Options
• Home Office Allowance
• Coworking Space Allowance
• Annual leave (40 days including local bank holidays)
• Company Socials (virtual or in person)
• Annual Global Offsite
• Plumm Health (mental health platform)

You can find a more detailed explanation here and you might be eligible for other benefits depending on your location.

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.