Engineering Manager

Posted Aug 28

The Company

Our mission: At Miaplaza, Inc., we are dedicated to delivering innovative educational experiences that drive our mission: Empowering children by providing them with excellent learning experiences so they can flourish and make the world a better place. Miaplaza's main K-8 curriculum platform is Miacademy (miacademy.co), and our high school platform is MiaPrep (miaprep.com).

We’re growing rapidly! Our products are popular because we not only produce world-class educational content, but also develop the matching tech to deliver that content in a very engaging and customizable way. Therefore, we are expanding our team in all departments, including software engineering. You can learn more about Miaplaza and our culture on careers.miaplaza.com

About the team

The Learning Team works directly on our company’s mission of providing children with excellent learning experiences. The team currently counts 12 developers, grouped into three teams with tech leads for each of them:

  • Student Learning experiences such as delivering educational content and assessments in an engaging way
  • Tooling and reporting for parents and teachers that enable them to provide a tailored learning experience for each student
  • Product excellence team, which provides common frontend components and ensures a unified and delightful user experience across the entire product

Although this is a fully remote position and you have the flexibility to work from anywhere, it's essential to be prepared to have overlap with standard working hours in Europe, as most of our product team is based there. Outside of this core overlap period, you have complete flexibility in determining your work schedule.

About the role

You will be overall responsible for leading the Learning team and accountable for the team’s success as a whole. Your key responsibilities will include:

  • Closely work with product management and UX designers to ensure our product strategy and roadmap is technically feasible and realistic.
  • Deliver on the product roadmap by structuring the team appropriately, helping the team set realistic quarterly goals (OKRs), and keeping development on track. Identify technical and process-oriented issues that prevent the team from being more effective and work to resolve them.
  • Help team members with their career development. Ensure appropriate mentoring is in place for everyone and personally coach the more experienced engineers and tech leads, while empowering them to independently lead their areas. Conduct performance reviews and provide actionable feedback to your reports.
  • Be involved in hiring, including of senior engineers and managers, in order to steadily grow the team. We will likely have to double the size of our engineering department every year in order to really make an impact in the education sector.
  • Influence the strategy of the overall engineering department by being part of the engineering leadership team.
  • Show concern for your report’s well-being and cultivate an inclusive team culture in which everyone feels a sense of belonging and can be successful

You can hear our CEO, Johannes Ziegler, discuss our company in this podcast:

What we offer

  • You get to work on an impactful mission, directly influencing the education of our students and receiving frequent feedback from them and their parents
  • You get to play a central role in a fast growing company with ample opportunity for career growth
  • You can choose your working hours, as long as you are prepared have significant overlap with European working hours (CET)
  • Benefits such as vacation depend on your country of residence and are negotiable
  • Competitive compensation: $150k - $200k (higher salaries possible for exceptional candidates)

Job requirements

Key Responsibilities:

You will be overall responsible for leading the Learning team and accountable for the team’s success as a whole. Your key responsibilities will include:

  • Closely work with product management and UX designers to ensure our product strategy and roadmap is technically feasible and realistic.
  • Deliver on the product roadmap by structuring the team appropriately, helping the team set realistic quarterly goals (OKRs), and keeping development on track. Identify technical and process-oriented issues that prevent the team from being more effective and work to resolve them.
  • Help team members with their career development. Ensure appropriate mentoring is in place for everyone and personally coach the more experienced engineers and tech leads, while empowering them to independently lead their areas. Conduct performance reviews and provide actionable feedback to your reports.
  • Be involved in hiring, including of senior engineers and managers, in order to steadily grow the team. We will likely have to double the size of our engineering department every year in order to really make an impact in the education sector.
  • Influence the strategy of the overall engineering department by being part of the engineering leadership team.
  • Show concern for your report’s well-being and cultivate an inclusive team culture in which everyone feels a sense of belonging and can be successful

Requirements:

  • While it is unlikely that you will write code on a daily basis in this role, we are looking for someone with at least the coding abilities of a Senior Software Engineer, and this will be tested as part of our recruitment process, without exception. This is to ensure you can understand the problems and trade offs involved in the work of your reports, are able to ask the right questions, and can make the right judgement calls where necessary. Therefore, we are looking for someone with the following profile:
  1. At least 7 years of software engineering experience, including in a senior role
  2. At least 2 years of management experience, including as manager of senior engineers and tech leads. Experience managing managers is a plus.
  3. Extensive full stack web development experience, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, backend development and SQL databases. Any experience with our tech stack (Vue.js, C#, Postgres) is a large plus point
  4. Extensive experience working cross-functionally with product management, UX and QA