(Sr) Engineering Manager
About Zowie:
At Zowie, we believe that buying online should feel like walking into your favorite local shop: personal, friendly, and easy. Our mission is to recreate offline shopping experiences online - but better. Zowie brings speed and empathy to customer interactions. Our platform automates responses to repetitive questions around return policy, order status, etc., and saves time for customer service agents, who can then proactively turn website visitors into paying customers. It can work as an add-on with existing tools (Zendesk, Shopify, Gorgias, etc.) or become a standalone customer service platform.
We are:
🚀 Growing fast. We plan on keeping the Team growing! You’ll have a lot of autonomy and impact as we grow.
🏈 Like a sports team. We take ownership of our work and believe in personal accountability. At the same time, we work together, support each other, and focus on winning as a team.
🧑💻 Remote-first and hours are flexible. We allow everyone to figure out the best ways to collaborate with their team. At the end of the day, it's about delivering! Those in Poland can work from our offices in Cracow and Warsaw.
We strive to be:
💪 Ambitious and innovative. We don’t settle on existing solutions and keep looking for better ways to tackle challenges.
👻 Bold and free-thinking. We trust our employees to find the best solutions.
🤸♀️ Agile and high-performing. We work smarter, not harder. We use our OKRs to keep ourselves focused.
🤠 Unafraid of change. Zowie is growing, and the market is changing. We thrive in an ever-evolving environment.
What you'll do:
You'll lead the expansion of our “Automate” product engineering team from 6 to 13-18 members in the first 6 months, forming 2-3 teams dedicated to different KPIs in our competitive Chatbot and Emailbot solutions.
As your direct manager (Michał), I prioritize hands-on engineering, autonomy, transparency, Radical Candor, optimizing strengths, and strong agility. I'm bold about building the best Product & Engineering organization, grounded in realism. Success requires smart decisions, effective execution, and hard work!
Delving into your role:
1. Hands-on Engineering Management: While you needn't be the top engineer, a robust technical background is crucial. Dive into code or system design without hesitation.
2. Autonomy & Transparency: I aim for full autonomy for you and your teams through extreme ownership and transparency. Ideally, I want to trust your judgment and be involved in areas where I can truly help and make a difference instead of needing to control everything.
3. Radical Candor: Challenge directly, reject mediocrity, and question the status quo. Communicate directly about growth areas with care and empathy, embodying our culture of caring about people through direct feedback.
4. Optimizing for Strengths: Understand your people’s strengths, and tweak their jobs to turn a solid performer into a key player.
5. Strong Agility & Quality: Leverage the agility of our small Engineering team for quick experimentation. However, you also need to guide the team to discern where to invest more, building a sustainable platform core.
In essence, your mission is clear: drive the delivery of the best suite of "Automate" products with teams that are engaged, satisfied, and happy to work with you.
To provide you with a glimpse into your daily routine, let me outline our current operational approach. While you'll have the empowerment to influence and evolve this, consider it your starting point:
1. Remote-First Culture: Although we maintain two physical offices in Warsaw and Kraków, the entire product team operates remotely. All documentation, discussions, and decisions occur online to ensure inclusivity.
2. Emphasis on 1:1 Meetings: Regular bi-weekly 1:1s with your direct reports and ideally monthly meetings with everyone in your organization foster a deep understanding of individuals and their challenges. Feel free to tailor this structure based on your evolving understanding.
3. Asynchronous Communication: We prioritize asynchronous communication through platforms like Slack, Loom, and documentation. Daily meetings are replaced by updates on Slack, and planning is conducted in smaller, more focused groups to enhance efficiency.
4. Execution and Sprint Planning: Collaborating with team leaders, you'll play a pivotal role in current execution and planning for future sprints. Balancing technical and business roadmaps, identifying and eliminating bottlenecks are skills we value and expect you to bring to the table.
5. Hiring: Building our team is key to our success. Initially, I'll be actively involved in finding the right cultural fit, but I aim to trust your judgment over time. Your approach to the hiring process—whether it's initial screenings, deeper interviews, or a combination—will shape our talent acquisition strategy.
6. Close Collaboration: Weekly 1:1s with me will be a regular touchpoint. You'll also collaborate closely with our Group PM, Jeremi, and Design Lead, Michał, along with their respective teams. Your role demands a strong grasp of both product and business aspects.
7. Strategic Collaboration: For more strategic decisions and future planning, you'll engage directly with Maciej, Zowie's Co-Founder, overseeing Sales, Product, and Customer Success teams.
In essence, this encapsulates your role, but I'm sure you have more questions. Let's have an open discussion during the interview process—I'm committed to transparency, and I hope for the same authenticity from you. Looking forward to our collaboration! 🚀
Ideally, you'll bring with you:
- Experience in both directly leading the teams and working with team leaders
- Experience with growing and mentoring other leaders
- Being able to challenge directly with empathy
- Strong people-growth mindset
- Strong product and business acumen
- Strong hands-on engineering skills especially in terms of system design for distributed systems
- Strong decision-maker
It will be awesome if you have:
- Strong Hiring Manager experience including designing the recruitment process
- Experience in deciding on compensation
30,000 zł - 37,500 zł a month
We will offer you:
👉 Employee Stock Option Plan (ESOP). You’re a part of our company’s future success.
👉 Unlimited paid time off. We trust each other and don’t count days.
👉 Great company offsites and individual integration budgets. We spend time together in person to strengthen our team.
👉 Health benefits. We offer an additional health insurance package.
👉 Development budget. We want to grow personally and professionally together.
👉 Home-office funds. Make yourself a comfy space for work on a daily basis.