Software Engineering Manager

LawnStarter is a marketplace that makes lawn care easy for homeowners while helping small businesses succeed. We've raised millions in venture funding and are growing fast. Are you a driven software engineer manager interested in helping give millions of Americans the freedom to spend time on what truly matters?

Working at LawnStarter offers you a chance to help solve the most important challenges in the marketplace industry in an environment that’s fun, collaborative, and innovative. We are looking for smart, creative individuals who are passionate about innovation and aren't afraid to show it.

Requirements

What you'll do:

As the Manager of Software Engineering at LawnStarter, you’ll report to the Head of Software Engineering and be responsible for managing cross-functional delivery teams. From understanding the business value to customer satisfaction you will be empowered to drive continuous improvement. 

To be successful, you will need to strongly collaborate with Product Management, Product Design as well as all different engineering specialties such as quality engineering, architecture, security, and more on everything from roadmap estimation to project execution and delivery.

You’ll be an integral leader for our team responsible for helping define engineering processes, tracking, and coordinating development initiatives as we deliver on our product roadmap.  Our ability to deliver quality software to our customers in a timely, predictable manner will be directly attributable to your capacity to identify and address challenges faced by your teams.  And as we continue to grow our business and mature our processes, you’ll play a pivotal role in charting our course.

You’ll also:

• Recruit, motivate, retain and lead a diverse team of engineers 

• Demonstrate the ability to deliver high-quality software sustainably with a predictable cadence 
• Build a culture of distributed responsibility where managers and team members are accountable and empowered to meet and deliver organizational goals 
• Experience the theory and complexities of distributed systems and can, when needed, dig into the details on system design, incident response, and the observability requirements needed to be successful 
• Experience working across geographic, cultural, and time zones 
• Build and manage distributed teams that have experience working with multiple programming languages and technology stacks 

• Support the growth of team members by making time for training, coaching, and career development. 

What we're looking for:

We’re looking for you if you’re an experienced engineer manager with a blend of people skills and a solid technical foundation. More specifically, we’re looking for:

• Someone with a fair amount of experience working on both server- and client-side web software. You should have familiarity with cloud development, why Test Driven Development (TDD) is critical while writing code, what makes an API RESTFul, what React is, what an XSS attack is, and how an MVC web framework works. That will probably mean you’ve been doing this stuff for a few years.
• Someone who understands fundamental computer science concepts. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have a CS degree. But you should be able to describe how a pointer works, what Big O notation is and how to use it, when to use composition and when to use inheritance and the differences between an array and a linked list and a set.
• Someone with a firm grasp of SQL and databases in general (including non-relational databases). You should know how to do CRUD operations, what indexes are and why they matter, and the difference between a left join and an inner join for instance.

What makes this role awesome:

1 - One Team, One Heart

We believe the most significant part of any work environment is the team. That’s why we have spent a massive amount of time finding humble, hungry, and smart folks that you will get to work with every single day. That’s a huge part of the reason LawnStarter received the best places to work in 2018 award from the Austin-American Statesman.

2 - Growth

We have a small, tight-knit engineering team willing to give responsibility to anyone that is hungry, humble, and smart. You’ll have opportunities to own large portions of our technical direction for new features, and larger projects. You’ll get to work with a team of passionate engineers who are eager to share our knowledge and experience, and also learn from yours.

3 - High-Performance Distributed Team Environment

We are a diverse and distributed team which are passionate about the empowerment to deliver daily value to our users. We have built our core business with great unit economics and efficiency. What does that mean? Well, that allows us the opportunity to solve new and exciting challenges building innovation leading the market segment we are in. Put simply, we have unique problems being solved in a fast-paced environment but are extremely stable and able to continue investing in the future. 

Benefits

• Great Culture: One of the top places to work in Austin in 2018, 2019, and 2020, and in the US in 2021, we are all about the team. That’s why we have spent a massive amount of time finding humble, passionate, and smart folks that you will get to work with every day.
• Work from the comfort of your own home
• 100-120K USD annually, depending on experience