Posted over 5 years ago

At Dataquest, we teach data science to a community of hundreds of thousands of students worldwide. We help students deeply learn concepts, build projects, work together, and gain the confidence they need to start new careers. Read more about our philosophy here, and read what students think here.We're looking for an experienced Director of Engineering to lead, support, and motivate our engineering team. We want to eventually help tens of millions of students worldwide change their lives through data science education, and you’ll play a key role in helping us get there.Who Should Apply?:We’re looking for someone who can build and lead a high-performing, student-focused, engineering team. While you’ll need to understand the technical nuances of our stack and architecture, you’ll be spending almost all of your time on management. We expect that your week will be 30% assisting and answering questions, 30% planning, 30% code review, and 10% coding. Over time, as the team grows, this will skew more heavily away from coding and code review, making it all the more important that you understand and welcome the challenges of management.While programming won’t be your main function, you’ll still need strong technical ability. As an engineering leader, you’ll asked to bring technical insight to strategy, architecture, and roadmap discussions. We have a team of talented and capable engineers. You’ll be counted on as a trusted mentor, helping grow their skills and careers. Technical skills and familiarity with our stack are critical for this.You should want to judge your performance by the performance of the engineering team as a whole. Ideally, you take delight in finding meaningful ways to connect with and grow your team’s performance and effectiveness, while fostering a culture focused on impact and ownership with accountability. You’ll need to be comfortable enforcing our values, and providing a clear and shared understanding of the team’s direction and priorities.You’ll need to be an effective communicator, as you’ll collaborate with the content, marketing, and support teams. It’s important that you have experience communicating across all layers of an organization.How You’ll Contribute: Help us grow the team from 6 to 15 in the next 18-24 months. Establish a strong engineering culture centered around on-time delivery and accountability. Get engineers to buy into team and organizational goals and priorities. Collaborate with other teams effectively. Work closely with product to create roadmaps and milestones. Resolve conflicts within the team and externally. Advocate for improving reliability and paying down technical debt. RequirementsMust Have: 4+ years experience as a software manager or team lead 3+ years software engineering experience Experience setting technical KPIs Experience with Python A passion for education and improving lives Nice To Have: Experience managing a distributed team Experience working remotely Strong interest in data science Experience building a positive engineering culture Our StackThese are some of the technologies you'll be working with at Dataquest, though you may end up introducing new ones: Our frontend is a modern React/Redux stack. Communication with the backend happens over a combination of websockets, GraphQL, and REST APIs. The main backend is Django on Python 3. We use Docker extensively, both for student code execution, and for deployment of our services. We use Kubernetes on Google Cloud to orchestrate our containers in production. Our data is largely stored in Postgres, with some caching in Redis. Why You Want To Work At Dataquest: The opportunity to see your impact on the lives of our students every day. The chance to work with an engaged and mission-driven team. The chance to contribute to product direction and decisions. The ability to work remotely. A supportive environment where you can get help when you run into blockers.