Engineering Manager at UsabilityHub

Build and enable our engineering team to support our rapid growth and take us to new heights.

A little about you

You’re a real people-person who loves making connections, fostering relationships, and supporting others’ personal and professional development. You recognise that the key to success is in enabling those around you, and you take pride in building and enabling a team of high performers. You’ve had experience managing people before, and you know how to grow and scale a team; you have some tried and tested coaching tools up your sleeve, but you are always learning new approaches and developing your skills.

You enjoy ‘zooming out’ to see the bigger picture, identifying patterns and connections so that you can see what’s working, and identify what needs improvement. You like to think big but start small, breaking long-term visions into manageable goals and assignable tasks, and adapting processes to suit those around you.

You’ve worked in software engineering for a while and pride yourself on your technical skills; you believe in keeping your skills fresh, so that you can lean on this knowledge to help people get unstuck. You’ve spent time in cross-functional teams, know your way around Scrum and Agile, and believe that the best outcomes happen through collaboration. You find yourself naturally coming up with innovative solutions, which you make a reality through experimentation and iteration alongside execution.

You’re a learner at heart, always exploring new ideas and getting to the truth of the matter. You are a curious, creative thinker who loves synthesising information. You want to make a difference in the world, and believe that delivering value to your colleagues and customers is one way to achieve that.

Who we are

Our remote UX research platform helps our customers take the guesswork out of design ideas by testing them with real people. Our mission is to democratise remote UX research by providing the tools and knowledge our clients need to make it simple, affordable and fast. We consider ourselves 12 years young, and have some great customers including Amazon, GoDaddy, and Zendesk. Our focus is on delivering our mission at scale, and massively expanding our reach through sales and product development.

Why we need you

We have spent the last few years refining a great product, and now we’re looking for someone to support our growth by building and enabling our engineering team. You will play a crucial role in hiring, onboarding and coaching new hires, scaling from a team of five to a team of 20 and beyond, as well as supporting the growth and development of the existing team.

Reporting directly to Nick, our CTO and co-founder, this role will be pivotal to our growth as a company, and we are looking for someone who will join us in pushing hard for success. We need someone who is passionate about coaching and developing people, with a strong technical background. Initially, you’ll have four to six Senior Engineers reporting to you, and some of them will have a couple of Mids reporting to them.

Our engineering team has two pathways for growth: people leadership & technical leadership.  Our people leaders take primary responsibility for supporting the growth, development and wellbeing of our people; and technical leaders take primary responsibility for architectural decisions, and pushing the development of our product.  You will be our most senior people leader, and Nick will retain responsibility for technical leadership.  You and Nick will work closely together to ensure that our people are prepared to deliver our technical roadmap, and that our roadmap is possible for us to deliver.

How we work

We’re a dedicated, growing team who are passionate about delivering value to our customers. We work hard and want to make an impact in the world, and recognise that comes with challenges that we deal with collaboratively and respectfully.

We support each other and understand that individual success is dependent on the success of everyone else, so we invest in our personal and professional growth and consider learning, reflection, and up-skilling central to our jobs.

We’re driven by Agile and Lean principles, working with Scrum to ship value iteratively.

We’re passionate about regularly adjusting and learning from feedback – both in terms of our customer value and our internal ways of working. We use Ruby on Rails for our backend and React/Typescript for our front-end, hosted on the Heroku PaaS, but we’re not too fussed if you don’t have specific overlaps with this tech.

Our engineers work in cross-functional product teams alongside designers and researchers.  Using a Scrum approach, these teams work together to deliver our product roadmap.  The scrum process and delivery of the roadmap is overseen by a Product Manager.  This matrix style approach means each of our leaders is able to focus 80% of their attention on one thing.  You’ll have 80% of your focus on developing our engineering team; Nick will have 80% of his focus on architecture and planning the Roadmap; and the Product Manager will have 80% of their focus on delivery.  The three of you will spend 20% of your time coordinating your activities and making sure you’re all on the same page.

Picture yourself in the role

If you were here this sprint, you would have:

• Met with each of your direct reports one-on-one to give feedback, discuss any challenges they are having, and discuss their priorities for growth and development.
• Met with Nick (our CTO and co-founder) to discuss the product roadmap and upcoming implementation targets with an eye to the team’s capacity to deliver.
• Conducted some preliminary interviews for a new software engineer role.
• Jumped in to pair with one of your team and do some coding to keep your skills sharp, build empathy for your team, and to get a close up view of their current skills.
• Answered incoming questions on our internal Slack channel to keep your team’s distractions to a minimum.
• Reached out to some potential candidates and previous star colleagues of yours on LinkedIn, to nurture relationships for any current or future open positions.
• Worked with your team to overcome a complication that’s come up in a POC.
• Conducted a quarterly performance evaluation with one of your team members to give and receive feedback, review their learning plan, and plan for their ongoing development.
• Drafted some goals that you’d like to achieve over the upcoming few months to discuss with Nick.
• Caught up with Nick and the Product Manager to review progress against the Roadmap, and discuss the latest directions the product is taking.  Shared with them the growth you’re seeing in the team’s skills, and progress on hiring, highlighting any skill or capacity gaps, or concerns the team have.

Location

This role is open to candidates in Melbourne (our HQ) or remotely to candidates within Australia who are able to work AEST hours.

Perks and benefits

• Flexible work schedule: We make sure work fits your life by offering a choice between a 5, 4.5 or 4 day work week.
• Employee profit-sharing: We share our success by offering all team members a cut of quarterly profits.
• Generous parental leave: We support growing families with 14 weeks of fully paid leave for primary carers and 6 weeks for secondary carers.
• Learning and development: We offer AU$1,500 per year for you to spend on books, courses and events along with 6 paid LevelUp days.
• Equipment and office: Whether you’re working from home, a co-working space or our office, we’ll cover everything you need to do your best work.

Keen to apply?

Please upload your resume, or Linkedin profile and a cover letter that addresses the three questions below:

1. What’s one thing that you see commonly in engineering management but you think isn’t the best approach?  Why?  What do you think is better?
2. Tell us how you go about developing a learning plan for someone.
3. Tell us about a time when you had to give some challenging feedback. What approach did you take, and what was the result?