Engineering Manager

Memrise is an award-winning language learning system with a growing user base of over 50 million.

At Memrise we know it's impossible to learn a language unless you can master three key skills.

1. Basic translation of words and phrases

2. Understanding them when they’re used in real-life situations

3. Being understood by other people

Translation is the easy part and many other products do this well but our method is the only one that will help people to master all three.

The Opportunity:

You will lead the Memrise platform team’s efforts to build backend and data infrastructure as well as supporting innovative new product features that delight our millions of users.

This is an opportunity to run the platform engineering team of a popular consumer product that is regularly featured on the app stores and has millions of users.

The team has a high level of technical quality but there’s still plenty of opportunities to raise the bar and have an impact.

Memrise has big plans for development on new areas of the product in 2021. We aren’t sitting still with what we have – we’re developing entirely new concepts that will immerse our users in language and allow them to communicate with each other.

Memrise has a diverse, harmonious, humble engineering team. We don’t have rockstars or ninjas; at Memrise, humility is a virtue.

The Team:

Our team values empathy for the people we work with and the community we work for. We support each other. We are purposeful in our actions and effective at collaboration.

You’ll be in a key leadership role of a team that is around 15 strong with growth plans to increase that number. You will be part of our engineering leadership and participate in crucial decisions alongside Product and Design team members.

This position is mostly based in London although we do have some flexibility around working location.

Requirements

• Line manage backend, infrastructure, data, and IT engineers
• Ensure effective delivery of platform projects
• Foster continuous improvement of the team’s processes
• Facilitate the team’s internal and external communications
• Cultivate a bold, empathetic, and playful product engineering culture
• Facilitate the development and execution of platform technical strategy
• Drive technical innovation that helps our learners learn
• Manage the platform on-call rota

Competencies:

• Solid commercial backend development experience using Python, Go, node.js, or similar languages

• Experience running delivery of a product focused platform engineering team
• Experience running teams in fast-paced consumer startups
• Ability to effectively line manage a team of up to 10 people
• Ability to raise the bar for performance of an existing team
• Ability to foster a team culture of continuous improvement through regular, actionable retrospectives
• Ability to design and implement processes where they are needed
• Ability to effectively delegate technical and delivery responsibilities
• Ability to drive key technical projects to completion in a sometimes chaotic startup environment
• Strong technical and organisational mentoring and coaching skills
• Excellent verbal and written communication
• Ability to drive platform technical strategy, in collaboration with the team and principal architect
• Ability to facilitate technical discussions and the creation of quality technical proposals

1 month

• The manager has taken over responsibility for the processes of the platform team and is actively improving them

3 months

• You have a good grasp of our release processes
• You have a good understanding of our systems
• We are making improvements to our speed of delivery
• Engineer sentiment is positive about the manager
• Starting to get familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of all platform engineers, and are assisting with their growth plans
• As a manager you are actively helping the engineers reach consensus on technical decisions
• The team has robust processes for continuous improvement

6 months

• The platform team is contributing innovations towards our product
• Backend engineers are effectively collaborating with client engineers, product and design
• You have set and are measuring key baseline health metrics for the team that are used to improve team performance

Benefits

• Share options, so you can retire on an island
• Generous Learning and Development budget for training, conferences, books and L&D leave
• Enhanced Parental Leave
• Flexible working options (time-wise, plus we have standing desks)
• Private health insurance with Vitality, and related perks (50% off a Virgin and Nuffield Health Gym memberships)
• Dental Insurance with Unum
• Quarterly hackathons
• Language classes with in-office and virtual tutors
• Pet friendly office and pet-petting colleagues
• Cycle-to-work scheme
• And plenty more fun you’re welcome to ignore, including: dodgeball, meditation, football, running club, board games, and boxing classes.

We’re an equal opportunity employer. If it’s okay, we’re not going to list examples of people and groups we don’t discriminate against. We don’t discriminate, full stop. We celebrate.

What’s it like to work here?

Interesting. Fun. Challenging. Serious. Odd. Silly. It just depends on the day, really. But whatever day it is, we love what we do: helping people all around the world learn more about languages, new cultures and each other. They use our product to broaden their minds and horizons. And that feels pretty good.

You’ll join our UK team of open-minded, big-hearted, goal-oriented ‘Memrisians’, made up of linguists, developers, designers, marketers and more, all working together to do great things. Get in touch if you want to join the team.

Find out more here: