Head of Engineering | Product

The Head of Engineering shapes our technology vision, strategy, and execution, and builds and maintains the structures for healthy and rapid scaling of the engineering organization.

Responsibilities

Make good software that wins our market

  • Ensure Momentum is technically sound, scaleable, and competitive.
  • Hone the thin edge of technical enhancement toward AI-ML, staying abreast of industry developments and benchmarking against our competition
  • Translate the product vision into a multi-year technical roadmap for the buildout of the product, driving innovation and scalability
  • Steward the strategy to create and defend our technical moat(s)
  • Identify long-term requirements (security, artificial intelligence, scaling, etc), and organize gradual delivery that maximize impact.
  • Actively contribute in the design, development, and testing of complex software systems

Ensure the software engineering team ships software on a startup cadence to support our GTM

  • Create and maintain a sense of urgency commensurate with the stage of startup
  • Establish and maintain engineering best practices, processes, and standards, ensuring efficient and effective development methodologies
  • Foster a collaborative and high-performing work environment by personally exhibiting our values and best practices
  • Provide strategic direction to the engineering team, ensuring alignment with our goals and objectives

Ensure the software engineering team can scale as we grow at startup pace

Build scaleable processes

Implement effective project management and development practices to ensure efficient workflow and high-quality output:

  • Ensure fast and smooth onboarding
  • Implement standardized coding practices and documentation
  • Establish clear communication channels and project management workflows
  • Develop a robust continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline
  • Create modular and maintainable code architecture
  • Implement testing and quality assurance processes
  • Build infrastructure for knowledge sharing and mentorship
  • Invest in tools and technologies that support scalability
  • Appropriately prioritize technical debt management

Build a strong, diverse, and complementary Team

Build the culture and process for, and personally lead by example in:

  • Attract Diverse Candidates: Lead the initiative to become an employer of choice for top talent underrepresented in engineering
  • Hiring Talented Engineers: Attracting and retaining engineers with complementary skills who can contribute to different aspects of the product development.
  • Fostering Collaboration: Encouraging a culture of–and building tools for–open communication, teamwork, and continuous learning to drive innovation and problem-solving.
  • Growing and retaining talent: Develop a clear career progression framework for engineers; Regularly review and optimize team structure and roles.

Contribute leadership, internally and externally

  • Build a strong horizontal culture throughout the company. E.g. translate tech team’s horizontal practices to other teams, where these can be helpful.
  • Establish Cadence OneFive’s brand reputation and leadership position within the software industry. Champion Cadence to external audiences as its software technology leader.
  • Collaborate with and across business domains to define and execute strategies to scale the company

Skills & Competencies

In addition to shared-competencies for “managers of one,” the HOE is expected to demonstrate:

Horizontal Leadership Competencies Software Engineer Competencies
Results Delivery Technical Proficiency
Strategic Vision Open-minded Pragmatism
Risk Awareness and Management Problem-Solving and Systems Thinking
Customer Focus Collaboration and Communication
Best-Practices Orientation Adaptability and Continuous Learning
Collaborative Leadership Attention to Detail and Quality Assurance
Transparency Promotion  
Adaptive Problem-Solving  
Continuous Learning and Development  

as well as:

Strategic Technical Vision

Possesses the ability to conceptualize and articulate a long-term technical roadmap for product development.

  • Demonstrates expertise in identifying and prioritizing critical technological advancements (e.g., security, artificial intelligence, scaling) to enhance product capabilities.
  • Exhibits exceptional resource allocation skills, optimizing team efforts for maximum impact across various projects.

Strategic Organizational Management

  • Exceptionally skilled at fostering an accountable, horizontal startup culture that effectively supports and energizes a diverse, distributed team.
  • Showcases proficiency in long-term organizational planning, encompassing talent management and financial stewardship within the software engineering domain.
  • Demonstrates the ability to cultivate and maintain a high-performance, collaborative work environment focused on “getting shit done”
  • Excels at the “tetris game” of deploying our resources on the most impactful projects.