Engineering Manager
Hello, we’re Farewill - we build simple, beautiful products to change the way the world deals with death.
We have some pretty big plans and ambitions for 2021 (and beyond), and to deliver on these we’re going to be growing our passionate, diverse and ambitious team of engineers to help make our mission a reality.
We believe that great Engineering Managers are a critical part of our Engineering guild, helping our amazing teams and engineers to deliver their goals and achieve their personal potential. We’re currently looking for an Engineering Manager to help us with this as we grow over 2021.
This role is a unique opportunity to join one of our multi-disciplinary product teams to help make a meaningful difference to people’s lives and work with some of our lovely people (folks like Ethel, Kees, Mo, Thomas, Sally, Kat, Emma, Chris, Karan, Lasse - you’ll meet more throughout the process).
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 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 the next 12 months you’ll:
- Work as an Engineering Manager in one of our multi-disciplinary teams.
- Line manage 5-8 Engineers.
- Work on hiring and growing our engineering team.
- Support your team in achieving their ambitious goals for the year.
- Improve engineering practices inside and outside of your team.
- Play an active role in our Engineering and Engineering Managers guilds, sharing knowledge, and encouraging good practice on both technical and management topics.
- Help evolve our line management, hiring and dev team practices.
- 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
🛑 For these hires we specifically need someone with a background in digital engineering management (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, working closely with product managers and engineers to deliver great products
- You’re able to talk to engineers and product managers about quality and technical strategy 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.
- You demonstrate empathy and integrity, both towards our customers and your fellow team members.
Outside of that these are the kind of attributes that we'd like you to have, but we’d also love to hear from people who could bring other strengths that we may not have thought about.
Some extra skills that would be great:
- We’re going to be growing our team so any experience with hiring or scaling engineering teams will be a bonus
- Experience of running improvements around areas like engineer onboarding, calibrating on performance or promotions, knowledge sharing, and community building.
- Been involved in organisation design, at any kind of scale.
- Experience developing applications with JavaScript (we use Node.js and React) and/or databases (we use MongoDB, PostgreSQL).
- Experience of working in fast-paced startup/scale-up environments.
- Experience working on large projects, and the code and contribution complexities that come with it.
- Knowledge of topics like web accessibility, performance, security.
- Knowledge of testing (both automated and manual).
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!
Benefits
- A salary based on our Engineering Manager Progression Framework/salary bands (this will likely be between £70-90k), plus generous stock options
- 28 days of annual leave plus the usual public holidays (with the ability to move these if you celebrate other days)
- Flexible working including when you start & end your day, and how often you come into the office (see below*)
- 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!
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.
About Farewill
At Farewill, we’re out to change the way the world deals with death. Helping people to take control, personally and financially, of what matters to them after they’re gone.
We launched our first product - our will-writing service - in December 2016, and since then we’ve grown to be the largest will-writer in the UK. We launched our second product, Probate, in early 2019, and recently our third, Cremation.
Our growth to date has been driven by an exceptional product (see our customer reviews) and key strategic partnerships. We’ve been featured in Forbes, The Times, The Guardian and on Radio 4 among others. We're also making waves in the charity world, with over £300 million raised for charities on our platform from gifts left in wills.
Our team
We’re a creative, focused team who love what we do. We have backgrounds in design, technology, behavioural psychology, and management consultancy. We love to learn from each other and our customers, and grow together as a team.
We’re backed by some of the best investors in Europe - from the founders of Transferwise and Zoopla, to Augmentum, Kindred Capital, and (in our Series B round that we closed mid-2020) Highland Europe.
This is an unusual, fascinating, and emotional area to work in – if you’re up for a big challenge we’d love to meet you.
If you’d like to understand our culture and product better, here’s a few articles for you to read: About Farewill, Life at Farewill, Are you worried about your will?