Careers

Engineering Manager (mid to senior)

‐ Farewill

Location

London, GB

Job Term

Full-Time

Company Website

farewill.com

Changing the way the world deals with death

Dealing with death — losing a parent, a partner or a best friend — is the hardest thing most people ever go through. For too long, it’s been a dreary affair with top hats, paperwork, and bureaucracy. We think it’s time for things to change.

At Farewill we build the best products in the world for dealing with death. Beautifully designed, easy to use, built for taking care of the people you love.

 

We’re now looking for an Engineering Manager at mid to senior level to join our growing product organisation.

We have some pretty big plans and ambitions for 2022 (and beyond), and to deliver on these we’re building a passionate, diverse and ambitious engineering guild to help make our mission a reality.

We believe that great Engineering Managers are a critical part of this, helping our amazing teams and engineers to deliver their goals and achieve their personal potential.

This role is a unique leadership opportunity to work with multi-disciplinary product teams in a rewarding problem space, and help make a meaningful difference to people’s lives. You’ll work with some of our lovely people (folks like Ethel, Kees, Mo, Kat, Emma, Karan, Lasse).

 

What you’ll be doing:

You can find out a bit more about Engineering Management at Farewill in this blog post, and our Engineering Manager Progression Framework.

Engineering Managers at Farewill come in many forms, but focus on building the environments to support our engineers. We don’t treat management as a promotion, it’s a path alongside engineer, and your work will be a mix of team delivery, people-centric work (to make sure we have motivated, productive, psychologically safe engineers), process improvements, and technical decision making. If you wish to, you'll still have opportunities to code, but we’d aim for this to probably not be in the critical path (so you’re not a bottleneck).

 

In your first year at Farewill, you can expect to:

  • Work as an Engineering Manager in our of our multi-disciplinary product teams or areas:
    • Partnering with engineers and PMs to define appropriate technology strategy and decisions for the team
    • Being responsible for team performance, delivery, quality, and velocity
    • Owning processes and effective running of product development rituals
    • Ownership of engineering staffing at a team level
  • Line manage 5-10 Engineers, helping them to grow in their careers
  • Play an active role in our Engineering Managers guild, improving engineering practices inside and outside of your team(s)
  • Be part of the hiring team for engineering, and work to improve our processes for hiring and onboarding
  • Gain an understanding of our business, our customers, and the domains we work in, allowing you to use your judgement to contribute to engineering-related decisions. (Our products are web-based, largely built using Node.js and React, with a blend of JavaScript and TypeScript).
  • Have opportunities to share your knowledge/experience/interests with the team - be it through pairing, a company passion talk or speaking externally.
  • Build a culture and environment of high psychological safety and inclusivity, where anyone can join and see a path for their own success.

Requirements

Hopefully, you’ll have some or all of the following:

For this role we specifically need someone with a background in engineering management in a digital space (as opposed to manufacturing, or other physical forms of engineering)

 

  • You'll be from a background where you’ve ideally developed yourself, or you’ve got proven experience of managing people who create web- or mobile- based applications (web is preferred).
  • You can line manage 5-10 engineers, and have successfully handled a wide range of different management experiences.
  • You have a great sense of your own management style, but can flex this around the needs of others
  • You’ve had experience working with multi-disciplinary product teams, helping them to work effectively, and being responsible for delivery velocity and quality
  • You’re able to work well with engineers and product managers, and are comfortable with working together on engineering goals, quality, technical strategy, and advocacy for improvements, to make sure we are building reliable and scalable products.
  • You’re able to work with others who may be remote at least part of the time, and have strong written and verbal communication skills.
  • You demonstrate empathy and integrity, both towards our customers and your fellow team members.

 

Some extra skills that would be great:

  • An ability to specify and lead on hiring needs for your team(s)
  • Ability to work in a company of Farewill’s size/scale/nature! (being comfortable with the subject matter, pace, level of change, and ambiguity)
  • Background as a software engineer, preferably with a back-end focus
  • Experience of working to create inclusive environments which support a diverse range of people
  • Experience of improving engineering practices, and can identify and help us improve any of our gaps

 

If this sounds like what you’d love to be doing, we can’t wait to hear from you. If you’re not sure that you exactly fit the above criteria, get in touch anyway. Ability and attitude is just as important as experience!

Benefits

What we offer in return:

  • A salary based on our Engineering Manager Progression Framework/salary bands (likely to be between £70-100k), plus generous stock options.
  • 28 days of annual leave plus the usual public holidays
  • Flexible working including when you start & end your day, and how often you come into the office*
  • Your own computer kit with a budget of up to £300 for working from home (mouse, keyboard, sitting/standing desk etc)
  • Personal development budget of 3 days and £1000 per year
  • Regular ‘passion talks’ and a range of team socials
  • Santander cycles membership!
  • A chance to make a meaningful contribution to people's lives and deaths
  • And much more!

 

The process:

A lot of our team are off over Christmas, so whilst we’re launching this now and will review applications, we’re intending to open interview slots properly in the new year. The interview process will be:

  • An initial video call with of our Talent team/hiring manager
  • A video interview based around your management experience and values
  • A video interview around your experience of working with teams and technology
  • Optionally we may do a follow-up interview with one of our leadership/exec team if there are outstanding questions
  • Hopefully an offer call!

 

About Farewill

One of the fastest-growing startups in the UK, in the last 12 months we’ve:

 

*Currently our lovely office in Haggerston is available if people want — and only if they want. Previously, we had work from home Wednesdays, however, our current plan is to move to a mix of office-based and remote working.

At Farewill, our mission is to change the way the world deals with death - to make it simple, personal, fairly-priced & accessible to everyone.

To do that, we want to build a workplace that’s great for everyone, that celebrates diversity in all its forms, and where everyone who works for us feels like they can be themselves, bring their whole selves to work, and be treated fairly, equitably and respectfully.

We believe flexibility is important, so we’re happy to chat to you about flexible/remote working options. And, If you need any flexibility or adjustments in our interview process - to help set you up for success - then please let us know too.

Apply now