Job Description
Title: Director, Software Engineering
Location: San Francisco, CA or Remote (Based in the U.S.)
NerdWallet has a mission to provide clarity for all of life’s financial decisions. We are looking for a Director, Engineering to join us in achieving that goal. You will help lead engineering teams across multiple departments, including CRM, our native application as well as our logged-in user experience.
This Director of Engineering role is the connective tissue between verticals such as credit cards, lending, insurance, etc. Your day-to-day will include a combination of technical people leadership (FTE and nearshore), architecture, and overall process and efficiency improvements. You will mentor and grow your engineering leaders while helping architect an overall data solution for the organization. Flexing your stakeholder management skills, you will explain decisions and approaches to non-technical leaders and challenge technical leaders to make the right decisions for consumers, the team, and the company.
This role will report to the VP of User Engagement.
Where you can make an impact:
- Build healthy, productive teams. You own the health of your teams, ensuring that they are challenged and growing. You forge goals into a bold, coherent vision for your group. You also maximize the effectiveness of your direct reports through mentorship and coaching.
- Deliver results. You push your teams to consistently deliver on major commitments that move our business forward. You drive key success metrics, communicate project status to stakeholders, and work to clear blocking issues from the roadmap.
- Customer focus. Use your deep understanding of how to connect data across multiple organizations and user experiences in order to consolidate the view of a customer and then leverage that consolidated view to enhance the user experience even further.
- Build cross-functional partnerships. You work with individuals across NerdWallet to ensure your teams align on business strategy and deliver on commitments. You work closely with product managers and program managers to maximize the success of your projects.
- Guide technical direction. You engage in technical discussions with your engineers and managers, working to understand tradeoffs and guide major decisions. You have been an engineer yourself and can dive into architectural details with your teams.
- Ensure operational excellence. You set high standards and drive best engineering practices. You focus your teams on addressing the right operational concerns and enable learning through incident postmortems and sprint retrospectives. You improve efficiency within sprints, estimates, and how projects are approached.
- Grow your teams. You partner with our recruiting group to identify a diverse set of world-class managers and engineers to hire. You take an active role in sourcing and interviewing candidates.
- Empower your teams. You are a role model of cross-functional leadership. You create a culture of creativity, collaboration, inclusion, and innovation across your teams.
You are:
- A hands on leader: You are an effective people manager but enjoy being down in the trenches day to day and writing clean, simple code with your fellow engineers.
- Communication and collaboration: You are able to work effectively with others. You will be working closely with developers and customer groups to build product features and high quality products.
- High-energy, company first, positive attitude: Must be motivated to work hard in a fast-paced environment.
- Able to work independently, operating without significant input or guidance.
- Skilled at resolving ambiguity. When there is uncertainty, you can work with project partners to define the path forward.
- Effective at building a strong data culture across the entire organization.
- Able to communicate effectively in a diverse set of circumstances. You are a clear communicator in a 1:1, an all-hands presentation, or a written document to executive leadership.
- Forward-thinking, looking around corners to anticipate risks before they occur.
- Technically-skilled, and able to understand technology tradeoffs that your teams will face.
- Effective at working with partners to develop a compelling long-term technical vision for your organization.
- Able to drive process improvements that make your teams more effective over time.
- Skilled at vendor selection and management, making sure the “right” partner is chosen and that results are delivered.
Your experience:
- 8+ years of professional experience managing software teams, with at least three years of experience managing other managers
- 5+ years of of professional experience as a software engineer
- Strong skills in critical thinking, decision making, problem-solving, and attention to detail
- Proven success in an Agile development environment
- Able to build excellent interpersonal relationships through the use of strong written and oral communication
- Deep understanding of data engineering principles, including data ingestion and data warehousing
- Expert skills in Python, Ruby, or PHP