Director of Engineering

What You'll Do — Team & Leadership

• Representing 25% of your time, you’ll manage a team of engineers who work across multiple projects. You’ll also collaborate with engineering leadership to support team growth, health, and evolution 
• Manage up to 6 engineers and guide them in their professional development through regular 1:1s and ad hoc support
• Guide and educate teams on engineering best practices
• Demonstrate a passion for learning, ability to create and adapt systems, and ability to collaborate with creative, technical, and business stakeholder team members
• Model and promote a highly collaborative, responsible, and ethical culture
• Direct and guide engineering teams, particularly with a focus on aligning our engineering efforts with our human-centered design (HCD) principles
• Contribute to the ongoing formation and maintenance of Coforma’s engineering processes
• Participate in business development efforts (proposals, presentations, etc.), when needed, providing expertise on product development and the delivery of engineering services
• Serve as a member of the engineering leadership team, discussing overall engineering strategy and helping to lead cross-vertical initiatives and projects

What You'll Do — Projects & Programs

• Representing 75% of your time, you’ll provide clear, strong, and visible leadership within projects, often acting as the engineering lead
• Lead engineering teams, in partnership with other disciplines, through both discovery and solution articulation, with a focus on integration and reducing burden
• Collaborate with researchers, designers, government/client stakeholders, product managers, delivery leads, and other engineers to understand and articulate requirements and constraints
• Communicate strategy to stakeholders through influence and presence
• Communicate and share often in written, verbal, and visual forms to create alignment and move the work towards implementation
• Identify weaknesses or risks and make recommendations to mitigate
• Analyze problems and determine appropriate course correction measures as necessary
• Step outside of your comfort zone to deliver on clients needs and contribute to Coforma’s success
• Act in a calm and steadfast way through both new development and when diving into legacy codebases
• Articulate the benefits and risks associated with different technical approaches in different functional environments

What You’ve Done

• 8+ years professional experience developing software in a team environment
• 5+ years experience with JavaScript and/or TypeScript
• 5+ years experience building applications using modern technologies such as React, Angular, or Vue on the front end and Node or Ruby+Rails on the back end 
• 5+ years experience working with APIs
• 5+ years experience with cloud infrastructures
• 5+ years experience with code-first approaches or database-first approaches to development
• 4+ years of experience managing teams in a complex product ecosystem with many sets of stakeholders

What You Know

• Comfortable communicating complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences effectively
• Familiarity with several modern front-end and back-end development frameworks
• Comfortable with back-end services: APIs, caching, auth, async, logging, client server integrations, and data persistence
• Capable of delivering application architectures and code that are highly scalable, available, and performant
• Operational knowledge of the software development lifecycle, virtual machine environments, and modern DevSecOps

Who You Are

• Analytical – analytical skills and an ability to create systems
• Planner – will anticipate what could go wrong when planning and coordinating, thoughtfully mitigating risks 
• Organized – will prioritize projects, complete tasks on time, and both document and share processes with others as needed
• Cooperative – will work collaboratively with peers, top executives, and high-level contacts; cooperate with staff across different teams, departments, and expertise
• Communicative – will communicate ideas and create personal relationships through writing and in-person exchange, customizing the delivery to the audience
• Travel flexibility – will attend in-person meetings, workshops, trainings, and more on request and with advance notice as assigned to projects that require it (up to 10-15%, with health and safety precautions being paramount)
• Calm and nimble – will navigate a fast-paced environment and ambiguity, changing priorities, and unexpected project challenges
• Autonomy – will to get work done fairly self-directed, requiring minimal supervision or direction from others
• Continual learner – is committed to ongoing learning and knowledge sharing
• Delegation and time management – will oversee multiple engineers on a project at once, keeping projects on schedule and engineers working within established deadlines and budget
• Brand representative – will represent Coforma professionally and sincerely, modeling the company values to be and help others be collaborative, accessible, empowered, informed, ethical and responsible, values-driven, and transparent for the sake of accountability and community

Other

• Internet – will prioritize and maintain access to strong, reliable internet for the remote nature of our work (except when on vacation/holiday)
• Security – will keep the highest security practices to ensure privacy and security of Coforma and client information given the nature of our work (even when on vacation)
• Full-time U.S. resident and citizen of the United States (must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. now and in the future without sponsorship)

We Don't Care About

• Whether or not you have a degree of any kind
• Whether your educational major, if you had one, is related to this role
• Whether or not you have GitHub contributions
• Whether or not you have worked at a well-recognized company
• Whether you’re sure that you check every single box perfectly

We Do Care About

• Your passions, professional or otherwise
• Your well-informed opinions about technology, teams, and process
• You