Engineering Manager

Who We Are

Open Up Resources is a non-profit publisher in pursuit of delivering the highest quality learning experiences for all students by providing educators best in class, research-based PreK–12 curricula and professional learning so they may support every student’s academic success and create in-class experiences that celebrate, honor, and empower all students.

The Role

The Engineering Manager position will report to the Managing Director of Product Engineering in the Operations team. This position will be a hands-on leader supporting the growth of the Engineering Team, in both technical and career skills. The Engineering Manager can expect to write production code, in addition to leading the team and communicating to the wider organization on the Engineering Team’s behalf.

Key Responsibilities 

• Lead, coach and mentor a virtual team of software engineers of varying experience levels, communication styles, and motivational perspectives. 
• Regularly re-evaluate processes and practices with an eye toward increasing developer satisfaction, improving cross-team communications, eliminating wasteful effort, and mitigating risk.
• Communicate clearly and empathetically with teammates of varying technical expertise through multiple channels and mediums: source code, diagrams/flowcharts, READMEs, bug database comments, Slack messages, emails, video meetings, and the occasional meetup IRL. You will talk directly to non-technical collaborators.
• Design user-centered software solutions using the best tools for the job, targeting the sweet spot between perfection, extensibility, and on-time delivery.
• Write production code and tests in assorted combinations of:
• Ruby (and Rails)
• HTML5, CSS3, Slim templates
• Javascript (vanilla ES6 so far)
• Work with product owners to vet business requirements, ensuring that they are clear enough for the development team to start confidently iterating.
• Center equity and psychological safety to ensure our team is a brave space for open and candid communication.

What to Expect 

On day 1:

Show up ready to pair with a teammate to get your development environment running, walk through your first code change, and deploy that change to the production servers

In your first 30 days:

• Get to know your teammates and collaborators in engineering, product, product management, and our academics team, through 1:1 conversations and project meetings.
• Gain experience and familiarity with our codebases, conventions, and processes.
• Pair regularly with teammates (as both driver and navigator).
• Begin taking on solo tasks.
• Open your first pull request, and deploy it to production after review and QA approval.

In your first 90 days:

• Collaborate with the Managing Director and Senior Engineers to document existing processes and technical implementations, “as-built”; identifying the how and why of our existing practices and architecture while questioning and noting ideas to improve.
• Regularly complete solo tasks from start to production.
• Actively participate in technical discussions, thoughtfully question existing and proposed approaches, explain alternate ideas.
• Start building a deep understanding of at least one curriculum. 

About Our Code 

Aside from occasional dev-ops and internal-systems tasks, most of our team’s work is focused on two Ruby on Rails applications: a custom content management system (CMS), and an authentication gateway for our web curriculum. Within the context of those apps, here are some of the things we do:

• Model a full-course curriculum, based on raw source content (e.g. in Word docs or XML exports), to a granular enough level that we can maintain, organize, report on, and flexibly re-constitute the content in that curriculum.
• Write custom ETL scripts to import (and validate the import of) raw source content into those models.
• Create views and queries to generate beautiful and well-structured presentations of the modeled content, for multiple export targets, such as print, web, and third-party platforms.
• Ensure connectivity and high-quality UX for integrations between our web curriculum and other platforms.

Requirements

Job Qualifications

• Minimum 5 years experience leading, managing and mentoring a team of software engineers. 
• Demonstrated experience and success in liaising between engineering and other internal departments.
• Minimum 7 years of experience as a software engineer. 
• Minimum 3 years of experience as a software engineer working with Ruby on Rails in a production environment.
• Minimum 5 years experience within product management and agile processes. 
• Extensive experience with web frameworks and a solid understanding of abstract modeling of complex data.
• Clear understanding of relational databases and SQL.
• Ability to thrive in a remote team environment. Self-motivated and generous with knowledge-sharing.
• Strong communication skills. You love to talk about what your code does and why.

Benefits

Additional Details

• At Open Up Resources, we believe in building and fostering an inclusive workplace environment. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer where all applicants are considered for employment without attention to color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.
• We are a virtual organization with headquarters in the California Bay Area. 
• We offer competitive compensation and generous benefits packages including healthcare, vision, dental, 401k matching, unlimited paid-time-off, and monthly home-office stipends. 
• This is a remote, full-time, benefited position with a salary range of $120,000-$170,000.