Full-Stack Technical Lead Manager

Remote, Portland ME, New York City NY, San Francisco CA

We believe that climate adaptation is a necessity, not a luxury, and communities deserve access to powerful software that helps them plan for the future. The challenge of climate change is complex – it implicates how municipalities plan, manage capital, and communicate to both residents and higher levels of government. Forerunner helps local communities do these things better by empowering them to access, understand, and mobilize local-level flood risk data at scale.

The engineering team at Forerunner strives to be small but dedicated, working relentlessly to help local governmental bodies and their floodplain managers reason about the flooding risks that all communities face in the USA. The domain is complicated, nuanced, and rapidly changing, and we at Forerunner break down this complexity for our users so they can do what truly matters - fight against climate change and the possible loss of homes in the case of flooding.

Engineers at Forerunner can work remotely from anywhere
within the United States
, so long as they are willing to work on either Eastern or Central timezones. We offer schedule flexibility and ask for accountability in return. We are unable to sponsor H1-B visas at this time, so permanent residency or citizenship is required.

Our tech stack and other engineering tools include, but are not limited to:

• Typescript /
  React.js /
  React Native frontend with
  jest/ cypress / maestro for testing
• GraphQL API powered by a Node.js /
  Typescript backend with
  jest
  for testing.
• Postgres as our database, alongside heavy use of
  postgis
• git
  , Github and Github Actions for code review and CI
• Deployment to AWS using ECS and similar products
• A variety of other cloud providers and SaaS tools, such as GCP and
  Twilio

While expertise with all of the technologies above is by no means not necessary, a working understanding of at least a few of them is required.

We strongly encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply - the problem of climate change impact all of us, and we want to reflect that within our team's composition.

A Full Stack Technical Lead Manager (TLM) at Forerunner is responsible for managing a team of 4-5 engineers on two major fronts:

• Managing the quality, correctness, and timeliness of the software their team produces by preparing for and leading planning meetings, writing and/or reviewing code, pair programming, and interacting closely with our design / product counterparts.
• Managing the career growth of their reports by conducting regular one‑on‑ones and quarterly reviews, as well as recurring mentorship where needed.
• We expect our TLMs to spend roughly 20‑30% of their time heads‑down coding, 40‑50% of their time on technical leadership duties, like code review and architecture planning, and the remainder 20‑40% of their time on their managerial duties. More explicitly, these duties are:
  • Provide hands‑on support to their direct reports to help them grow in their careers, as Forerunner strongly believes in continued learning and up‑leveling. To do this, a TLM provides actionable, constructive feedback during recurring one‑on‑ones, code reviews, quarterly reviews, and mentorship meetings.
  • Build, test, and deploy full‑stack software on a regular basis, working within our frontends, backends, and with the underlying data modeling that underpins them. This means working on a Postgres query one day and on a React component the next, all the while making sure all work is adequately tested.
  • Review the work of your team with a compassionate yet thorough, critical eye. This includes pair‑programming with and mentorship of more junior engineers, which means hoping on a Slack or Zoom call with another engineers to collaborate on a particularly thorny piece of code or to talk through different approaches that can be used to solve the problem at hand.
  • The engineering team gives all engineers the opportunity to plan out and execute on large features, and as a technical lead manager, you’d be responsible for writing the occasional design document as well as providing guidance for and thoroughly vetting those designs of your team,…