Senior Manager, Engineering

Posit creates software that helps people understand data and make better decisions in real-world applications. Our core offering is an open-source data science toolchain that is used by millions worldwide, and we aim to make it available to everyone, regardless of their economic means. 

We’re a Certified B Corporation®, which means we’ve written our open-source mission into our corporate charter. Our commercial products support this work, which helps data scientists manage their work and share the results with others.

About the role

Posit is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to drive software delivery and coach the talented, dedicated team working on Posit Package Manager. In this position, you will lead both people and processes and directly impact the design, execution, and quality of one of Posit’s core products.

Posit Package Manager provides a secure, reliable, and scalable way to distribute and manage R and Python packages across an organization. Built-in vulnerability scanning and management bolsters security and compliance efforts. It can provide an air-gapped source of CRAN, PyPI, and other packages for high-security environments. We are striving to develop the best multilingual package manager for data scientists. We also provide an important free tool to the data science community through Posit Public Package Manager.

What you will own

• Managing a team of individual contributors and leading them in shipping value to our customers
• Maintaining the software development process, identifying and eliminating bottlenecks to empower the team to deliver with the least amount of friction
• Adding to cohesive, high-performing teams through strategic hiring
• Supporting the people on the team, helping them to grow and flourish

What you will help with

• Collaborating with product management and technical leads to scope and plan projects and maintain the roadmap
• Working with QA leadership and other stakeholders to ensure that we set and meet our high-quality standards
• Measuring team effectiveness and devising plans to mitigate bottlenecks
• Working together with other teams to come up with engineering and product solutions
• Creating opportunities for customer interaction and product feedback loops

What we will learn from each other

Depending on your background and expertise, some of these will be things you’ll teach us, and some will be areas where you will get to grow as part of the team.

• New perspectives on how to organize and design processes that help us deliver the best quality software in a way that also is sustainable for the people involved
• Effective communication styles, both within the team, as in specifications and requirements docs, and with stakeholders, as in translating between user needs and technical work breakdowns

• A deeper understanding of cloud computing and integrations, particularly how they relate to data science workflows
• Differences between delivering a product that runs on-premises versus a SaaS product and the implications of that difference for the development process
• The Posit products, both open-source and commercial, and how they empower our customers to do effective data science through code

Within one month, you will…

• Get to know everyone on the product team and become familiar with our current software development practices
• Start building relationships with your direct reports to understand their goals and how they align with the team’s objectives
• Dig into our issue backlog and product strategy and start connecting the dots
• Get familiar with the development culture and practices by reading code, reviewing pull requests, asking good questions, and engaging with the substance of our work
• Ship something small in the project's Go codebase. Writing code won’t be a primary job responsibility, but getting your hands on the code at this stage will help you to understand better the context in which your team works

Within three months, you will…

• Facilitate our regular cadence of software development and delivery, identifying ways to improve our workflows and processes
• Successfully guide the delivery of a high-impact project
• Participate in planning and roadmapping to help the team identify our best opportunities
• Establish trust with your direct reports, be familiar with their individual growth plans, and start looking for opportunities to enable their ongoing career development

Within twelve months, you will…

• Coordinate major initiatives that span across multiple releases
• Give tactical guidance on how best to deliver complex projects
• Provide career development resources; grow leadership and enable technical achievement across the team

About you

• Empathetic: you enjoy seeing your team realize their full potential, individually and collectively, and appreciate that cultivating these relationships takes time and intention. 
• Technical: you are comfortable diving into the code to understand how things work. Even if you are not an expert in the language or domain, your prior experience writing software helps you to find the right question to ask that can unblock the experts on your team. 
• Product-minded: while you enjoy solving technical challenges and mentoring people, the best part is doing that in the service of delighting your product’s users. You don’t lose sight of the “why”. It’s not required that you have worked in data science, devops, or other fields from which our users come, but prior experience with the product space will help you get up to speed quicker.
• Pragmatic: you’ve experienced what works well and what doesn’t, but you know that there’s no magic recipe for fostering a healthy, productive team. You listen to understand and then collaborate with your team on solutions that work in the current context.
• Curious: you’re driven to learn new things and continuously improve.