Director of Engineering

OUR ENGINEERING CHALLENGES

Latchel’s Engineering team is fully remote and international (spread across North American time zones). We have 4 full stack engineers and plan on growing the team to 10+ engineers within the next 12 months. These engineers will be split into two main specializations: APIs and integrations, and the user facing application. As we grow beyond 10 engineers, we will need multiple managers.

Latchel’s operation is a 24/7 service, so high reliability and uptime is essential. We also lean heavily on 3rd party integrations for our core data (e.g. our customer’s property lists and current residents are integrated in and out of our system). Unfortunately, many of these 3rd party application APIs are poorly documented, may be unreliable, or could change without notice. If Latchel is going to provide high quality service, we need to be able to operate effectively despite these limitations. It is our job to engineer around these challenges.

Up to this point, we have been a heavily product-focused organization. We want to continue to scale rapidly and we are starting to feel some of the growing pains within the engineering organization. We need an advocate for our engineering team that will help surface and prioritize the necessary infrastructure and improvements that will enable us to build rapidly and maintain a healthy, engaged, and productive engineering team.

EARLY PROBLEMS TO SOLVE

We are expanding our product, design, and engineering teams simultaneously. As we grow the teams, we need to improve our product, design, and technical grooming process. In particular, we need to improve the process of how we translate product requirements into actionable engineering tickets, including design when applicable.

Even with our current small team, we run into issues with our branching and deployment strategy that causes unnecessary delays in testing and deployment. We need to find ways to continuously speed up our deployment process and reduce the amount of stale code.

We will be expanding our team quickly over the next year and beyond. Right now we don’t have a cohesive onboarding process to ramp up new engineers and help them get comfortable and productive quickly.

MORE PROBLEMS TO SOLVE

We need to set a vision for the engineering organization that aligns with Latchel’s vision: what technology practices, tools, and infrastructure do we need to put into place to enable Latchel to deploy more features, faster, and with higher quality and better performance? How will you drive this vision so Latchel continues to prioritize it to maximize growth?

As we grow the team, it is critical for us to establish tools to not only track, but improve performance. This applies to both individuals within the team and the team as a whole.

Latchel is (and will continue to be) heavy on senior and strong intermediate level developers. We need to build a bench of future talent to ensure the continued health of the engineering organization. How can we develop a culture that fosters and develops junior level talent into strong individual contributors and beyond?

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Direct, oversee, enable, and manage the engineering team.

Work with founders and senior leadership team to develop and drive company goals. Create engineering vision and goals that align with company goals.

Develop, establish, maintain, and enforce consistent and high standards for code quality across the engineering team.

Perform code reviews with your team (i.e. we’re looking for candidates that are <5>