Director of Engineering

Job Description

Who are we?

Thanx is a leading provider of digital guest engagement for offline businesses. Brick-and-mortar retailers, restaurants, and malls are facing an unprecedented crisis in the aftermath of COVID-19; Thanx helps these businesses embrace digital purchasing, capture greater customer data, and take action on that information to personalize every interaction with their guests. Our proprietary integrations with credit card networks (e.g. Visa) provide the volume and accuracy of purchase data which sits at the core of every product we build. Last quarter, Thanx saw record digital purchasing and marketing campaigns initiated on our platform, even amid a global pandemic. Recently named to the Nation’s Restaurant News “2020 Power List” as one of the 50 most influential innovators in food-service, our CEO describes our vision: “Brick-and-mortar commerce in the US alone is a multi-trillion dollar category but most businesses still severely lack the data and tools to deliver personalized, closed-loop marketing. Thanx is on a mission to change this permanently.”

Thanx has gained the investment of prominent venture and growth equity luminaries, having raised more than $30M from elite investors such as M33 Growth, Ribbit Capital, and Sequoia Capital — with our most recent financing coming earlier in 2020 (feels like a lifetime ago, huh?). Core to our success is a culture that has attracted some of the best talents from across the country; we are proud of our incredibly strong employee tenure, track-record of internal promotions, and impressive alumni network. We credit our cultural “core behaviors” with these accomplishments: Find A Way, Focus on What Matters, Say “Thanx” Genuinely, Welcome Diverse Perspectives, and Empathy Over Ego.

Note: The position is remote within Canada and United States.

About your role

We’re a strong engineering team that is building a platform to enable restaurants to compete in a world being threatened by the disruptive e-commerce businesses. With millions of users and thousands of businesses on the platform, we’ve found strong product-market fit and are growing rapidly. We’re building out massively scalable backend systems and APIs, beautifully designed user experiences, and highly intelligent marketing tools. We take pride in our platform and recognize the value of paying down tech debt, investing in the future, and truly making our codebases enjoyable to operate in. As Thanx continues to quickly grow, we’re expanding our engineering team.

Some technology we use:

• Frontend: React, React Native, Redux, Typescript
• Backend: Ruby on Rails, Golang, gRPC
• Infrastructure: AWS, Fargate, Terraform, Docker, Kafka
• Data: Fivetran, dbt, Snowflake, Looker
• Development: CircleCI, Github, Datadog, Sentry

As a DoE at a growth-stage tech startup, you will wear a number of different hats. First and foremost, you are a people manager and are a student of management, radically candid feedback, and servant leadership. You will help scale our organization by growing the people you lead, hiring and retaining talent, improving our process and org structure, and leading R&D efforts against the business domains you are responsible for.

You will be managing the engineering teams that are responsible for the platform, consumer, and commerce domains of the Thanx platform. There is current a platform squad and a consumer & commerce squad. Each of these teams are lead by existing senior engineers that are acting as non-management team leads and the consumer/commerce team has a dedicated product manager and product designer on the squad. These teams are full-stack and run autonomously — setting their own roadmaps and managing their own sprint proceses. As our business scales, we are looking for not only additional technical leadership in our team, but a strong management support structure within our organization to help us scale these domains.

Responsibilities

People — recruit, retain, and grow talent

• Manage and grow the engineers around you with empathy, candid feedback, and servant leadership
• Identify growth opportunities and help your reports achieve their short-term and long-term career goals
• Conduct regularly scheduled 1-1s and review 15Fives of all direct reports
• Conduct 6-mo review cycles for all direct reports
• Contribute to leveling and compensation review processes
• Champion and help others adopt a growth mindset and an ownership mentality
• Manage end-to-end recruiting responsibilities as a hiring manager for the teams you lead — from sourcing, candidate management, to closing
• Find the right balance between insulation and transparency for the team — holding your team accountable to their commitments while ensuring they can focus on what’s most important
• Manage the performance of engineers that report to you
  • Recognize and celebrate the success of stronger performers
  • Deliver radically candid feedback as needed
  • If necessary, manage an individual through a performance-improvement plan (PIP) or out of the organization
• Exemplify Thanx core behaviors :
  • Find a way
  • Focus on what matters
  • Say “Thanx” genuinely
  • Welcome diverse perspectives
  • Empathy over ego

Process, Structure, & Culture

• Support management agile sprint processes — planning, standup, retro, etc
• Collaborate with R&D leadership on cross-team initiatives, both cultural and technical
• Develop a perspective on organizational or process bottlenecks within the R&D organization and cross-functionally (not limited to your team) and proactively advocate for solutions to eliminating these bottlenecks
• Support the management of organizational communications and message reinforcement in 1-1s. Depending on the circumstance — ensuring stability, inspiring urgency, holding the team accountable — in whatever forum necessary (1-1s, R&D All Hands, squad meetings, team meetings, etc)
• Manage cross-functional expectations for the commitments of the team you lead
• Collaborate on establishing a roadmap and priorities with your product counterpart for the team that you lead
• Manage the execution of the engineers under your purview against team goals
• Hold cross-functional team members accountable through open communication, feedback, and clear expectation-setting
• Take the lead on organizing celebrations for the team as needed
• Collaborate with engineering leadership to identify improvements and make changes to team structure as we scale
• Collaborate with engineering leadership to establish, iterate on, and manage the team against engineering metrics

Technology

• Champion our platform strategy
  • Collaborate with the platform team lead to establish and advocate for a strong platform roadmap that will enable us to improve the quality of our platform and efficiency of our team
  • As the customers of the platform team are the other developers on the team, be a champion for developer productivity — pushing for platform simplification, reusability, rewfactor
  • Example initiatives:
    • Continue to advance our platform transition from distributed monolith to loosely-coupled microservices
    • Introduce new architectural patterns
    • Collaborate with product-focused teams on eliminating
• Manage execution of our consumer and commerce roadmaps
  • Collaborate with the existing team lead and product manager to manage the team’s execution
  • Identify, prioritize, and eliminate any roadblocks standing in the way of developer productivity
  • Collaborate with the team to harden and de-risk restaurant customers launching on the Thanx platform consumer and commerce experiences
• Drive the vision and advocate for the architectural enhancements, re-platforming, and refactoring initiatives that will enable us to scale the part of the platform under your purview
• Be a strong advocate and voice for your teams’ roadmap — balancing product initiatives with engineering initiatives — finding the right balance of product innovation and long-term sustainability
• Be a thought-partner to R&D leadership on overall product/platform strategy — contributing to roadmapping and priority-setting discussions