As a senior engineering manager at Appcues, you will be responsible for coaching two teams of 3-4 engineers and QA to accomplish their most significant work. Through exceptional servant-leadership, mentoring, and agile practices, you will ensure your team’s success and professional growth.

Appcues is a SaaS platform used by thousands of companies to improve their products without writing any code. Our world-class customers, such as Amplitude, Lyft, and Segment, embed Appcues in their products to influence user behavior and grow their business through beautiful in-app experiences they design.

About the role

• • The engineering and product team currently has 22 people organized into four teams with clear missions and accountability. This year we will grow the team by 40%.
  • You will report directly to our VP of engineering and product, Chris Brookins. Your peers on Chris’ team include the other engineering managers, product managers, and head of design. 
  • The engineers you manage and coach collaborate in two cross-functional and empowered product teams with a product manager and designer. One team owns our JavaScript SDK and Flow Builder, which allows customers to design in-app experiences such as onboarding guides, tips, announcements, and surveys. The other team owns our Studio app’s analytics, auth, and role-based access. Recent projects have included refactoring our Flow Builder for quality and performance, ensuring our tools produce ADA-accessible experiences and adding Flow analytics to our Studio app.
  • You will coach your team through exceptional hiring, mentoring, and one-on-ones to ensure they live our values and improve their craft. As a servant-leader, you will remove impediments, identify growth opportunities, and celebrate your team’s successes.
  • You will help your team balance the dual priorities of adding new customer-value and paying down technical debt. You know these investments are crucial to build a modern, agile platform over the long-term.
  • You will be responsible for scheduling and leading our agile team meetings such as grooming, planning, and retrospectives.  You will perform capacity planning and partner with product managers to estimate timelines and manage a cone of uncertainty.
  • You’ll collaborate with product, customer success, technical support, and sales to translate customer needs into working code and a delightful UX. 

About you

• • You can comfortably work 9-5 Eastern Time.  We are a 100% remote-1st company so you can work from anywhere in North or South America. We are not hiring from Europe, Africa, or Asia-Pacific because we require 8 hours overlap to collaborate effectively with our team members who work 9-5 Eastern Time.
  • In the past, you’ve been a successful engineer. However, your real passion is to lead and mentor people, making a more significant impact through others. Your other passion is helping your team evolve as empathetic humans and exceptional engineers.
  • You have a track record of coaching teams to deliver large, complex SaaS projects to completion. This isn’t your first rodeo in the cloud.
  • You are an outstanding communicator, both verbally and in writing. You naturally document plans for transparency so future employees can quickly get up to speed. 
  • You are comfortable managing and coaching remote teams and believe it is the future of work. You embrace asynchronous communication and work hard to help your team achieve an ideal flow and deep, focused work.
  • You have excellent judgment and have made many critical decisions by collecting information, asking questions, and weighing various trade-offs. You are quick to admit when you have been wrong and are comfortable being vulnerable about what you learned.
  • You are a systems thinker that relishes team and project challenges and enjoys figuring out how to make things better. In stressful situations, you are the calm, steady voice of reason.
  • When needed, you don’t fear difficult conversations to resolve a situation and do what is right. You understand the value of direct, transparent, respectful, and kind feedback, knowing that it’s a gift your teammates can use to grow.
  • You are an excellent active listener with humility and empathy. You naturally build relationships with your team and peers. You often debate the other side of issues and try on other people’s perspectives so that you can learn new things. 
  • When you make requests of others, you effectively communicate the context and urgency. You’re excellent at connecting big goals to your team’s tasks and ensuring they understand how their work is meaningful and essential.
  • Diversity and inclusion aren’t just buzzwords to you. You know you can’t have a world-class team without people with various backgrounds, perspectives, and skills.
  • You are incredibly thoughtful when it comes to hiring people and can identify their strengths and where they can improve. You prioritize hiring someone that is a long-term complement to the team versus someone who thinks like everyone else.

How we work

• • We are 100% remote, committed to agile development, and work in two-week iterations. We manage our work via Github and Clubhouse and communicate using Slack, Zoom, and our Notion wiki. When ready, engineers create and send a pull request with tests and tag their team for review. We use CircleCI/CD to deploy feature branches to staging and merge to production.
  • We ship multiple times a day behind feature flags, perform gradual rollouts, dogfood, and don’t call the project done until we have achieved successful outcomes & metrics.   
  • Our engineers use React with styled-components and Redux with redux-saga to create experiences that communicate with internal APIs (Node and Elixir) and other services all in AWS (EC2, ECS, Lambda, DynamoDB, Aurora, Kafka, etc). We submit draft PRs, strive for TDD, and write tests in Jest, Cypress, and RainforestQA to verify behavior and document work.
  • Each team has a tech lead who writes code, provides technical mentorship, and is a key member of product discovery.   The entire team, not just QA, tests PRs and releases behind feature flags. Code is never thrown over the wall to be tested by someone else.
  • Our product process starts with a written problem brief and customer research. After narrowing the problem down it goes into discovery (with the product lead, tech lead, and design lead) to find a viable solution that assesses the four main risks. When ready, team members collaborate to break down the related epics into stories using the design mocks, tech architecture, and constraints identified during discovery.  

Our Benefits

100% remote - We don’t have an office which ensures all of our employees learn and collaborate in the same way using remote work practices. This won't change post-COVID as we are committed to being 100% remote for the long-term. We work in Slack, Zoom, and a collection of modern collaboration tools. We have inclusive remote events and, after COVID times, will get together twice a year for a fun off-site retreat.

Well-being - You'll have solid health, dental, and vision plans; access to 401k, and a generous maternity and paternity leave.

Home office and tech budget - We offer a $1000 home office stipend and an additional $500 annual budget for extra work-related technology.

Coworking space, on us - Home office not cutting it? We'll reimburse your monthly coworking fees.

Equity - We want everyone invested in our success. We grant every employee equity in the company.

Transparency and collaboration - We foster team alignment with meetings of all shapes and sizes—a monthly all-hands meeting called FirstThurs, weekly team lunches, and Lunch & Learns.

Unlimited vacation - We believe time away to reflect and explore makes us all more productive, so we expect each employee to take a minimum of ten days of vacation per year.

About us

At Appcues, our mission is to help teams build products their users love. With Appcues, you can create in-product experiences (user onboarding, feature announcements, checklists, and more) without writing any code. We believe it’s the non-technical people who often have the best information about a user’s needs and desires, and we give them the tools to act.

We’re a dynamic group of talented teammates who challenge, trust, and care about each other, their work, and the success story we are writing. Our values are not just words. We live by them.

Appcues is an equal opportunity employer that commits to diversity and inclusion and also celebrates it. We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, religion, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability status, or marital status. We believe that diverse teams foster a more inclusive company culture, build better products, and are more human, humane, and fun.

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