Engineering Manager

Latchel Engineering Manager

DO YOU WANT TO JOIN A RAPIDLY GROWING TEAM AND HAVE A BIG IMPACT?

Latchel is a Y Combinator-backed, high growth, and well-funded startup seeking an Engineering Manager for our rapidly growing Engineering team. We are a fully remote company and invest heavily in creating a strong culture to keep us connected.

Our team is still small and nimble and there are ample advancement and growth opportunities inside of Latchel.

OUR ENGINEERING CHALLENGES

Latchel’s Engineering team is fully remote and international (spread across North American time zones). We have 4 full stack engineers and plan on growing the team to 10+ engineers within the next 12 months. These engineers will be split into two main specializations: APIs and integrations, and the user facing application. As we grow beyond 10 engineers, we will need multiple managers. 

Latchel’s operation is a 24/7 service, so high reliability and uptime is essential. We also lean heavily on 3rd party integrations for our core data (e.g. our customer’s property lists and current residents are integrated in and out of our system). Unfortunately, many of these 3rd party application APIs are poorly documented, may be unreliable, or could change without notice. If Latchel is going to provide high quality service, we need to be able to operate effectively despite these limitations. It is our job to engineer around these challenges.

Up to this point, we have been a heavily product-focused organization. We want to continue to scale rapidly and we are starting to feel some of the growing pains within the engineering organization. We need an advocate for our engineering team that will help surface and prioritize the necessary infrastructure and improvements that will enable us to build rapidly and maintain a healthy, engaged, and productive engineering team.

EARLY PROBLEMS TO SOLVE

1. We are expanding our product, design, and engineering teams simultaneously. As we grow the teams, we need to improve our product, design, and technical grooming process. In particular, we need to improve the process of how we translate product requirements into actionable engineering tickets, including design when applicable.
2. Even with our current small team, we run into issues with our branching and deployment strategy that causes unnecessary delays in testing and deployment. We need to find ways to continuously speed up our deployment process and reduce the amount of stale code.
3. We will be expanding our team quickly over the next year and beyond. Right now we don’t have a cohesive onboarding process to ramp up new engineers and help them get comfortable and productive quickly. 

MORE PROBLEMS TO SOLVE

1. We need to set a vision for the engineering organization that aligns with Latchel’s vision: what technology practices, tools, and infrastructure do we need to put into place to enable Latchel to deploy more features, faster, and with higher quality and better performance? How will you drive this vision so Latchel continues to prioritize it to maximize growth?
2. As we grow the team, it is critical for us to establish tools to not only track, but improve performance. This applies to both individuals within the team and the team as a whole.
3. Latchel is (and will continue to be) heavy on senior and strong intermediate level developers. We need to build a bench of future talent to ensure the continued health of the engineering organization. How can we develop a culture that fosters and develops junior level talent into strong individual contributors and beyond? 

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

1. Direct, oversee, enable, and manage the engineering team.
2. Work with founders and senior leadership team to develop and drive company goals. Create engineering vision and goals that align with company goals.
3. Develop, establish, maintain, and enforce consistent and high standards for code quality across the engineering team.
4. Perform code reviews with your team (i.e. we’re looking for candidates that are <5 years removed from being a developer / in code).
5. Create and establish tools and mechanisms to enable technology scalability while maintaining high service availability and code quality.
6. Continuously improve deployment velocity while maintaining high service availability and performance.
7. Participate in cross-functional process improvement to keep the rest of the company engaged with engineering  (e.g. help develop a release communication process).
8. Hiring and development of the engineering team.

COMPENSATIONS AND QUALIFICATIONS

We expect your full time job to be people management, organizational development, and recruiting. Our team is 100% fully remote (and has been since long before the pandemic) and have no plans to change. Experience managing remote teams (and thriving in remote environments) is essential. We are not yet asynchronous and would need a significant cultural change to move to asynchronous remote.

We expect engineering managers to manage 8-12 engineers. Beyond that point we’d need to hire additional managers. Experience managing similarly sized teams within an org that underwent similar growth is a major plus. As the org grows we expect management to be split between APIs and 3rd party integrations on one team and user facing application development on another. Soon after, we would need more senior leadership and we’d prefer to promote internally.

As a 100% fully remote team, we are open to international hires. We pay competitively based on national average wages but have limited capacity to pay based on your preferred metro area. We use opencomp.com to set US wages (and offer great medical, dental, vision, and 401k). We pay international hires via letsdeel.com. 

Read our engineering job posting for more details on our stack.

HOW TO APPLY

1. Send a resume and a brief introduction and why you’re interested in the role to jobs@latchel.com. Include [Eng Manager] in the subject line. 
2. You will receive an invite to speak to a cofounder to ask questions about the company and the role.
3. During this process, you will be asked for a writing sample (limit 500 words): Describe a time you had to implement a less than ideal workaround solution in order to meet an urgent business need. What was the ideal solution? Why wasn’t it feasible? What did you put in place instead? How did it go? 
4. The Latchel team will review the writing sample and schedule a panel interview. You will also have the opportunity for 1:1 conversations with your future team members and peers.
5. After the interviews, you will receive a decision within 1-2 business days.

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