As Director of Platform Engineering at Appcues, you will be responsible for
the success of the Appcues platform, including the teams of engineers that
sustain, extend, and scale it. Specifically, you will manage the engineers on
our Foundations and Data teams to help them accomplish their most significant
work. Your mission is to ensure these teams and Appcues services continue to
support our product roadmap and customer needs for years to come.
About us
* Appcues is a SaaS data and experience platform used by thousands of companies to improve their products adoption without writing any code. Over 1500 customers embed Appcues in their web and mobile products to grow their business by influencing user behavior through custom in-app experiences they design. Appcues has delivered over 3.6 billion embedded user experiences and manages over a petabyte of data.
* The Appcues platform is based in AWS using Elixir and Node services that leverage EC2/ECS, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Kafka, S3, Snowflake, Airflow, and Terraform.
* We collaborate using Slack, Notion, Zoom, Github, Shortcut, CircleCI, Whimsical, and other modern tools.
* The engineering team currently has 38 fully remote people, organized into eight teams with clear missions and accountability. We all work aligned to USA-Eastern hours even though we are a fully remote company spread across seven countries.
About the role
* You will report directly to the VP of Engineering, [Chris Brookins](https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbrookins/). Your peers across product, engineering and design include other senior engineering managers, product managers, and designers.
* You will manage and coach senior backend engineers across two platform teams (currently nine engineers and hiring more). The Foundations team is responsible for our core platform services and infrastructure. The Data team is responsible for performant analytics.
* Your teams are responsible for evolving our platform’s services and data model and maintaining our objectives for COGs, MTBF, MTTR, and SLOs. We operate an effective (and very quiet) on-call rotation across all backend engineers and an associated incident response process.
* You will help your teams balance the dual priorities of adding new value to meet our product team’s needs and investing in operational excellence by paying down tech debt. You know these investments are crucial to building a modern, agile platform that scales over the long term.
* You will be responsible for coaching your teams through exceptional hiring, mentoring, and one-on-ones to ensure they live our values and improve their craft. As a servant-leader, you will remove impediments, identify growth opportunities, and celebrate your team’s successes.
* You are responsible for your team’s agile practices and collaborating to improve them as needed (currently Kanban with regular grooming, planning, and retrospectives). You will perform capacity planning and partner with tech leads to estimate timelines and manage a cone of uncertainty.
* You will support our backend guild to evolve our cohesive architecture and platform development practices across all backend engineers within your teams and those embedded on product teams.
About you
* In the past, you’ve been a successful hands-on tech lead and distributed systems engineer. However, your real passion is to lead and mentor engineers to make a more significant impact through others.
* You have a track record of leading teams to successfully deliver large, distributed systems projects in AWS.
* You lean into difficult conversations to resolve a situation and do what is right. You understand the value of direct, transparent, respectful, and kind feedback, knowing that it’s a gift your teammates can use to grow.
* You are incredibly thoughtful when hiring people and can identify their strengths and where they can improve. You prioritize hiring someone that is a long-term complement to the team versus someone who thinks like everyone else.
* You are an excellent active listener with humility and empathy. You naturally build relationships with your team and peers. You often debate the other side of issues and try on other people’s perspectives so that you can learn new things.
* You are comfortable managing and coaching 100% remote teams. You embrace asynchronous written communication and work hard to help your team achieve an ideal flow and deep, focused work.
* Diversity and inclusion aren’t just buzzwords to you. You know you can’t have a world-class team without people with various backgrounds, perspectives, and skills.
* You have excellent judgment and have made many critical decisions by collecting information, asking questions, and weighing various trade-offs. You are quick to admit when you have been wrong and are comfortable being vulnerable about what you learned.
* You can comfortably work USA Eastern Time hours. While we are a 100% remote-1st company, and you can work from anywhere, we require overlapping hours for effective collaboration between your team and peers.
Note - Appcues uses a market-data driven approach to setting compensation
ranges, and pins compensation ranges to data provided by third-party
organizations. This range is for all US-based candidates and is built to be
competitive nationwide by utilizing ranges for the Greater Boston area,
regardless of where in the US an employee lives (or later relocates). This
range represents salary-based compensation and does not include our equity
package (in stock options), 401k match, or other benefits including an office
setup budget, tech budget, training and education budget, and co-working space
reimbursements. Actual compensation offered to a successful applicant may be
based on job-related experience and other factors consistent with applicable
law. For non-US based candidates, Appcues adjusts salary ranges based on cost
of labor in each market. If you have questions on the pay range in your
country, the recruiter will be happy to discuss specifics during your
introductory conversation."
About Us
Appcues' mission is to help teams deliver experiences their users love. Our
vision is for every software company to embrace product-led growth, resulting
in more engaged and happier users.
Our Benefits
100% remote - We don’t have an office so all of our employees learn and
collaborate in the same way using remote work practices. This won't change
post-COVID as we are committed to being 100% remote for the long-term. We work
in Slack, Zoom, and a collection of modern collaboration tools. We have
inclusive remote events and we get together annually for a fun off-site
retreat.
Well-being - You'll have solid health, dental, and vision plans; access to
401k, and a generous maternity and paternity leave.
Fair pay - Each role has a defined salary band, bands and salaries are audited
on a regular basis to help maintain fairness and market value
Home office and tech budget - Besides paying for your work computer (Mac or
PC), we offer a one-time $1000 home office stipend and an additional $500
annual budget for extra work-related technology.
Coworking space, on us - Home office not cutting it? We'll reimburse your
monthly coworking fees.
Equity - We want everyone invested in our success. We grant every employee
equity in the company.
Transparency and collaboration - We foster team alignment with meetings of all
shapes and sizes—a monthly all-hands meeting called FirstThurs, weekly team
lunches, and Lunch & Learns., and an annual learning stipend.
Flexible Time Off - We believe time away to reflect and explore makes us all
more productive, so employees don’t accrue vacation time – they work with
their managers to schedule time off when they need it, consistent with our
Flexible Time Off policy. Employees based in the USA also take off all US
federal holidays. Employees residing in other countries can choose to follow
their local national holidays or US federal holidays.
Appcues focuses on SaaS, Product Design, Design, Software, and Predictive
Analytics. Their company has offices in Boston. They have a mid-size team
that's between 51-200 employees. To date, Appcues has raised $1.2M of funding;
their latest round was closed on December 2014.
You can view their website at <http://www.appcues.com> or find them on
[Twitter](http://twitter.com/appcues),
[Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/appcues/), and
[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/appcues).
