Engineering Manager

More and more organisations are seeing the value in talking to customers, and as such the user research practice continues to grow across many industries. Teams are conducting more interviews, usability tests, focus groups, surveys, and more than ever before. Qualitative research is time consuming to perform, and it’s challenging to analyse, store, manage and find unstructured data in a collaborative and privacy compliant way.

Dovetail is the leading cloud data analysis and research repository platform. We believe customer-obsession builds the best products, so our mission is to ‘enable product teams to make better decisions through the power of customer understanding’. We think what we’re building is an exciting and brand new category of software.

We’re a product-led, bottom-up, self-service software company founded in 2017. We have thousands of paying customers of all sizes ranging from individuals and small agencies to large enterprises and consulting firms. Companies like Figma, VMware, Shopify, BCG, GitLab, Porsche, Canva, and more trust Dovetail to analyze, store, and manage their research data and insights, often across multiple teams and locations.

We're now looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a team of 5 product engineers. We want someone who is passionate about coaching and developing people and has a background in engineering.

• Great people developer. You'll be a strong coach and have the ability to bring the best out of people to help them achieve their ambition. You can push people out of their comfort zone to drive their development and be able to evaluate performance.

• Building great teams, recruiting and hiring. You'll be heavily involved in hiring high-quality engineers and you'll be able to assess your current team and identify the skill-gaps to create hiring plans with our People function.

• Work in a product engineering team. You are highly collaborative in your approach, and work closely with product design and engineering team members.

• Ad-hoc coding. To be an effective manager we believe you need a high degree of empathy and respect. To help with this you'll be getting into the code, perhaps contributing to the team's project, or working on some automation scripts.

• Optimizing engineering performance. You're accountable for ensuring the team is operating as best it can, and is constantly improving.

• Execute in the face of ambiguity. We are moving fast and defining an entirely new category of software, which means we are faced with plenty of uncertainty and ambiguity. It is critical that you're able to balance strategic thinking with rapid execution. You believe in constant progress over perfection.

• Be able to think big, but start small. At Dovetail we set lofty goals and have a bold, exciting vision for our product. You'll be able to build new teams from scratch, or work with existing teams to develop them into the best version they can be.

• Experience managing product software engineers. You've managed a team of engineers and are comfortable giving and receiving feedback to motivate and steer them to success. You confidently identify areas for improvement, provide timely guidance, and motivate them to reach their goals.

• Good technical background in software engineering. You have first-hand experience developing software, and you're confident that you could make modest but meaningful contributions when embedded in a team.

• Experience with different product development methodologies. You're familiar with Scrum, Kanban, and everything in-between. You understand the value behind different rituals, and are able to confidently mix and match to create the most effective blend for the team at hand.

• You've built engineering teams from the ground up. You confidently navigate the early forming and storming phases of team. You've been instrumental in establishing new teams from scratch, deciding on the roles, recruiting to fill them, and growing it into a highly effective team.

• You've worked in cross functional teams with product managers and designers. You believe that the best outcomes come from working collaboratively rather than in silos.