Head of Engineering

Job Description

Our mission is to make meaningful learning a part of your everyday 🧠. The shelf life of our skills is now less than 5 years. So, if you stopped learning today, your skills would soon be irrelevant. Think that’s a big problem? You’d be right.

Enter HowNow. Founded in 2019, our Learning and Skills Platform is disrupting the way people learn and upskill through technology. Whether it's finding a quick answer, learning skills or tapping into shared knowledge, we make it easy for people to learn what they need, when they need it.

Already used by fast-growing scale-ups and global enterprises, such as Trainline, Depop and Sanofi, we’re pushing the boundaries of how people learn.

Hi I'm Ashish, the CTO and Co-Founder at HowNow 👋🏾 I’m looking for a Head of Engineering to join us.

There has never been a better time to join HowNow. From raising Series A last year, to signing our biggest ever customer by some margins this year, we are on the brink of something big, and you'll play a huge part in this journey by helping to scale, and build our innovative learning product.

We are looking for a true people leader, that is excited by change, embraces the unknown, and loves to solve challenging problems. As our Head of Engineering, you'll oversee a direct team of 6 reports, with an indirect team size of 30+.

Have a watch of the video below to get an understanding of what it's like to work here.

Day-to-day tasks will include 📩

• You’ll lead the team to successfully solve the top engineering challenges, e.g transitioning to a fully horizontally scalable system, modularise system into microservices for key components
• You’ll enable decision-making on enterprise architecture and component-level software design, all the way to timely build and delivery of our software platforms.
• You’ll lead the team to continuously ship product and engineering improvements every sprint in the most productive way possible.
• You’ll line manage our engineering teams (backend, frontend, QA, DevOps) and their team leads, consisting of 30+ engineers
• You’ll lead talent management including hiring, developing and retaining a world-class team,
• You’ll build, communicate, and execute robust development, documentation, and product engineering processes
• You’ll eliminate impactful or widespread production incidents

The key things that we will be looking for in applicants 🔑

• You’ll have around 15 years of experience in software engineering, with at least 5 of those in similar leadership positions in a scale-up software product company ideally series A-C
• You have previous experience indirectly managing a team of 30+
• You have managed designing and implementing microservices architecture
• You have hands-on experience, scaling tech platforms to a large scale
• You have experience in delivering low-latency, high availability and performant systems in a fast paced agile environment
• You have experience as a hands-on engineer (developer, QA, etc)
• You’ve got excellent written and verbal communication skills, organisation and time management skills
• You’ve had exposure to JavaScript, Ruby, Python, React, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.

What you’ll get:

💰 Our salaries are calculated using a SaaS benchmarking tool called (Figures). Happy to disclose upon application. You’ll also receive a performance based bonus on top.

🏡 Hybrid working (in our offices 3x a week Mon-Wed)

💆 Wind-down Fridays. No meetings from 3pm onwards on Fridays, for you to wind down for the weekend. Our HowNow’ers use this time to exercise, study, or spend some time with their family and friends, which you can read about here

👼🏼 Enhanced maternity and paternity policies which you can read about here

🌴 25 days holiday, plus bank holidays and your birthday day off

📚 An annual £200 learning and development budget

🐶 Dog friendly offices - we love our pets! 🐾

🤩 Monthly socials and team dinners which have included Bounce, Mystery Rooms, ITC Maratha, JW Marriot and many more

💡 Access to the very best learning platform out there (HowNow+) to keep you at the top of your game

What's next? 🤔

Once you've applied, we'll get back in touch with you. This is usually within the next 5 working days. Sometimes it can take slightly longer, but we will get back to you irregardless of what the outcome of your application is.

1. You'll be invited to a 30-minute video call with Dom, our Senior Talent Partner, to discuss your experiences and the role.
2. You'll be invited to a 45-60minute video call with Ashish, our CTO to discuss your experiences and the role.
3. You'll be invited to a 60minute video call with Ashish, our CTO and Nelson, our CEO, delivering back how you'd approach a number of strategic Engineering business challenges.