Engineering Manager, Solution Architecture

Overview

As an Engineering Manager on the Solution Architecture team, you will be part of a team that owns the design and integrations of products and their modules. The team creates and maintains context maps, API designs, and sequence diagrams, then partners with engineering teams to turn those solutions into production software. The team also maintains our Developer and Architect Portal, aiming to make simple the communication of our software stack and its capabilities.

As an engineering manager, you will be responsible for the strength of the Solution Architecture team and the stewardship of the code and technology that it uses. The former involves promoting a holistic view of our business’ domains, fostering teamwork, coaching inter-personal skills, and hiring and evaluating team members. The latter will have you developing architects’ skills in the tooling we use as well as team and department patterns and practices.

At times the manager will also identify areas where tradeoffs need to be made between various concerns (e.g., timelines, quality, complexity, performance) and facilitate the effort to reach an agreement on the right approach.

To accomplish all of this, the manager must, themselves, have strong technical and interpersonal skills.

Ready to get in the driver’s seat? Join us!

• Guide staff in understanding and delivering on the company’s long-term goals by:
  • Working with your manager to develop a deep and nuanced understanding of the company’s goals and, working with staff, develop quarterly plans to implement associated features.
  • Effectively and continually communicate and keep salient the vision, strategy, and roadmap. Be able to discuss how each team member’s work is contributing to those ends.
  • Participating in the feasibility assessment of new features, the cost to implement them, and the possible implementation timelines given current priorities and staffing.
  • Ensuring your services protect and appropriately manage the company’s data and user’s privacy.
• Influence and support the maturation of architects and our engineering practices by:
  • Educating architects of our standards, practices, and idioms and ensuring adherence to them. This will require you to have a deep knowledge of these things as well as the reasoning behind them.
  • Educating architects on, and evaluating solutions for, quality. This includes things like auditability, deployment practices, documentation requirements, evolvability, maintainability, performance monitoring, operational readiness, testing regimes, security evaluation, and risk mitigation.
  • Coaching architects on effective ways to share knowledge within and between teams. This includes effectively communicating with other groups regarding your work upon which they depend, and the quality of our standard solution artifacts.
  • Coaching architects on the art of identifying and evaluating the many tradeoffs that come up during system development. For example, between a very detailed search API capability, versus returning a list of aggregate entities to the client, or between user experience and security and performance considerations.
• Develop a healthy and dynamic team that values and participates in the growth of individuals, the team, and the company by:
  • Recruiting, hiring, and maintaining staff that bring in diverse thoughts. This includes providing timely, candid, and respectful feedback on the staff’s accomplishments and misses.
  • Running an onboarding and career progression curriculum that helps guide individuals in developing their skills through deliberate practice, self-mediated learning, and mentorship.
  • Coaching architects on the application of psychological and sociological topics like trust, perspective taking, critical thinking, path dependence, emotional contagion, and deliberate practice.
  • Maintaining a workload that balances new feature development, beneficial technical and process improvements, and staff’s learning and development.
  • Tracking, reporting on, and responding to qualitative and quantitative measures of team health and capacity.
• Facilitate the collaboration within your teams and between your teams and the rest of the company by:
  • Collaboratin…