Engineering Manager

GiddyUp is a Performance Agency with a powerful in-house global e-commerce and CMS platform. Our mission is to help the best products win by connecting brands and shoppers worldwide.

We are disrupting the commercialization model - traditionally, growth starts with funding and brands need large marketing budgets in marketing, creative, media, and agencies to have a high-growth go-to-market strategy. GiddyUp democratizes commercialization - our large network of marketing partners bring innovative products to shoppers through our proprietary performance commerce platform and the market decides the growth trajectory of the products.

Having already generated over $1 billion in sales – GiddyUp’s Partner Commerce model enables brands to profitably scale across every online channel and international market – on a 100% performance-only basis.

GiddyUp is looking for a hands-on engineering manager who can leverage their technical background, industry knowledge, and team relationships not just to manage, but to inspire, support, and continually drive our engineering team towards success. You’ll be responsible for setting the technical direction for the team, making tradeoffs between technical investments and product work, and communicating the strategy transparently to the team and to leadership. You will help shape the product direction by developing a deep understanding of the customer and working closely with cross-functional teams from Product, Design and Data Intelligence. You will lead a group of talented engineers and help the team deliver significant business impact while being open to change through constant experimentation. We’re looking for someone who wants to roll up their sleeves, problem-solve and contribute to our codebase.  If you enjoy collaborating with technical and nontechnical teams on a product with real-world consumer facing impact, this is the role for you! 

This role will be responsible for managing 5 Software Engineers and an outsourced engineering agency. This role reports into the Head of Product.

What You’ll Do:

• Ship Products:
• Lead a team of talented backend and frontend engineers who like to ship code and tackle hard engineering problems
• Be hands on, contribute to the codebase and problem-solve with your team 
• Collaborate with Product to scope new features and develop technical solutions to ensure effective and efficient delivery 
• Maintain a balance between building sustainable, high-impact projects and shipping things quickly
• Instill a spirit of continuous improvement in the team’s code, architecture, and processes
• Own your team’s deliverables and ensure we continue to ship scalable, highly-available products that delight our users
• Collaborate with external engineering vendors and stakeholders
• Work closely with our external CMS development team to get a comprehensive knowledge of the platform and support the team as needed
• Responsible for managing the engineering budget including technology stack, full-time resources and external resources  
• Manage The Team:
• Leverage your technical background to directly benefit the team, lead by example when faced with challenging problems, and encourage technical discussions to help the team reach a consensus
• Mentor and guide the professional and technical development of your team members,  help develop their careers, and assign them to projects tailored to their skill levels, personalities, work styles, and professional goals
• Build teams that are collaborative, inclusive, and respectful of each other
• Work closely with HR to recruit and hire high caliber candidates from diverse backgrounds; meet with job candidates; evaluate technical screenings, find the right engineers to further build out our team
• Collaborate closely with upper management and leadership to ensure the wellbeing of your department and the alignment with the company culture and goals
• Daily Operations:
• Own the platform infrastructure and ensure the platform scales appropriately during high load periods
• Responsible for ensuring the platform stays up-to-date and standard maintenance is completed
• Working knowledge of Data Privacy and Compliance standards and the implication on features being developed
• Ensure platform has adequate performance testing on both the backend and frontend
• Co-own scrum, sprint planning, daily stand-ups, retros, backlog grooming with product 
• Create plans for prioritizing technical and resourcing challenges with the engineering organization
• Own all technical documentation, architecture diagrams, and keep the domain model up-to-date
• Effectively project manage engineering work to ensure the engineering team does not create roadblocks on cross departmental projects 
• Communicate and collaborate with other managers, stakeholders and contractors
• Keep upper management in the loop to ensure they can make informed decisions regarding the business and the team 

Competencies:

• Collaboration & Teamwork: works collaboratively with managers, colleagues, and external stakeholders to achieve identified goals and objectives; works to create alignment across teams.; Is consistent, predictable, and easy to work with
• Communication: conveys information in a clear, accurate, and appropriate way in verbal and written communications; considers tone, attitude, and intention when communicating with a coworker, group or external stakeholder; acknowledges that one’s experience and opinion is one’s own
• Ownership: takes ownership of work, projects, challenges and outcomes; fulfills commitments and addresses blockers; Is self-directed and consistent in meeting job requirements and objectives  
• Technological Fluency: is proficient in the use of work-related software, technology, and tools required to perform one or more of the responsibilities related to one’s role; stays up to speed on new technologies and leverages technology to increase productivity and efficiency
• Decision Making: resolves issues within the team and makes meaningful decisions quickly; values “progress over perfection” and ensures the team is unblocked and able to make constant progress
• Business Perspective: has a deep understanding of both how GiddyUp functions and how our stakeholders operate; has the ability to apply appropriate advising to help our organization and all stakeholders achieve desired outcomes
• Managing Resources: evaluates, identifies, and leverages team members’ key strengths, develops areas of improvement, conducts ongoing performance management and guides professional growth; sets team priorities in line with company goals and manages the activities of one’s team accordingly 
• Adaptability: Ability to meet the changing technical landscape, continually evolve skills, learn knew technologies, and embrace new development processes
• Software Development: Ability  to plan, design, create, amend, verify, test and document new and amended software components in order to deliver agreed value to stakeholders
• Velocity: The number of story points an employee achieves each sprint 

What Success Looks Like:

• What you will have accomplished 30 days in: 
• Have a deep understanding of our engineers, their skill sets and their professional goals
• Have a deep understanding of our business model and key components of our platform 
• What you will have accomplished 90 days in: 
• Have a comprehensive understanding of our platform 
• Identify resource gaps and future resource needs 
• Increase velocity, ensure proper scoping, reduce number of bugs, challenge product epics to ensure engineering has properly scoped work assignments
• What you will have accomplished 6 months in: 
• Materially improve GiddyUp’s engineering culture and create a collaborative and safe environment for our engineers to learn, grow and deliver in
• Fully own all engineering work product and take responsibility for the outcomes of the engineering department 

Tools & Technology:

• Frontend - HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Tailwind CSS
• CDN - Fastly, Cloudflare
• Backend - PHP - Laravel or Yii, Django 
• System monitoring tools - DataDog, Sentry, Circle CI, Cypress
• Collaboration Tools - Slack, Zoom, Google Suite, Jira
• Payment gateways - Stripe, PayPal, QBO, etc. 
• Platform Infrastructure - Cloudfront, Cloudformation, RDS, ECS
• Data Infrastructure - AWS S3, Snowflake, ETL and reporting tools
• Ad Platforms / Pixel Tracking - Meta, Google, Taboola, OutBrain, TikTok
• Analytics Tools - Mixpanel, Rudderstack, Retool, Google Analytics, 
• Task/workflow management tools - Confluence, Linear and Jira
• Wireframing/Prototyping tools such as Miro and Figma
• Understanding of coding standards and documentation
• Understanding of Github and Postman 

Required Education & Experience:

• 5+ years of relevant development or engineer management experience in a start-up environment
• 3+ years experience managing a team of Engineers and providing mentorship and career progression and planning 
• Experience with Agile methodologies
• Experience with Java or other object-oriented languages
• You have a technical background and are able to contribute to planning and design discussions
• You are steadfastly focused on your customers
• You have experience leading a team of engineers and guiding them through their career development
• You believe in building both teams and products that scale
• You enjoy working in a collaborative environment, and you’re committed to driving projects to completion creatively
• You can motivate and instill a strong sense of ownership in your team
• You have experience guiding teams through planning, prioritization, and execution of work
• You think ahead and build for the future
• You are able to thrive in a heavily cross-functional environment and drive projects to completion regardless of the organizational structure

Preferred Education & Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Communications, Marketing, Business Administration or a related field
• Experience working in e-commerce 
• Experience working in a start-up environment
• Certified SCRUM Professional 

GiddyUp strives to provide a flexible, fun working environment. GiddyUp is a remote company and we’re looking for reliable team members who can succeed in a fully remote environment.