Job description
In 1940, German submarines sank more than twelve hundred British ships. Without regular shipments of food, the British Isles would starve. They needed a new strategy.
Surprisingly, the strategy didn’t come from the sailors engaged in the day-to-day of combat with German U-boats—it came from eight women from the Women’s Royal Navy Service. With the help of former ship captain Gilbert Roberts, who trained them on the practical capabilities of the ships and submarines, they ran wargames that revealed the British seriously misunderstood German tactics: they had assumed the U-boats would attack from outside the shipping convoy; in actuality they waited for the convoy to pass over them, and attacked from the stern.
The women—nicknamed the Wrens—developed new strategies for fighting the submarines, overcoming skepticism when 18-year-old Janet Okell five times defeated a British admiral in submarine wargames. The tactics they developed were extremely successful, and they trained over 5,000 officers throughout the course of the war.
Their success highlights how a small and highly capable team working on the effectiveness of a larger organization can unlock powerful new potentials, leading to an outsized impact. At Mercury, our Developer User Experience (DUX) Teams fill the role of enablers, via education, tooling, and frameworks that support those building the product. Mercury is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead our Backend Developer User Experience team.
As the Senior Engineering Manager for Backend DUX, you’ll lead a team of incredibly talented engineers in creating a developer ecosystem which delivers speed, quality, and enjoyment for Mercury’s 200+ engineers. Mercury’s primary backend language is Haskell, and your team is comprised of industry recognized thought leaders in that community. You’ll report to the Director of Stability, Infrastructure, and Developer UX, work alongside other platform teams whose overarching mission is to achieve startup-like developer effectiveness at scale.
In this role, you’ll be responsible for:
- Instrumenting the SDLC, ensuring we have effective quantitative and qualitative ways of understanding our engineers’ speed, quality, and enjoyment of their work.
- Adopting and evangelizing a product-centric approach to improving the effectiveness of our backend engineers through the introducing of novel tools and methodologies.
- Guiding the organization through adoption of solutions, and championing their integration across Mercury’s broader engineering team, and graceful sunsetting of legacy solutions we wish to move past.
- Cultivating a trusting, psychologically safe, and challenging culture on your team.
- Working with other Infrastructure, Stability, and Developer Experience leaders, Product Management, and other stakeholder teams on setting the long term vision for and defining what the software development journey looks like at Mercury.
And here are some traits we think would be helpful for the job:
- You possess a passion for enabling other engineers, and you feel a great sense of reward as your team’s investments improve engineering velocity and enjoyment. You’re always eager to challenge your own and your team’s assumptions, creating data-backed cases for investments and strategic shifts.
- You’re receptive towards both positive and critical feedback from users, ensuring customer insights drive our decisions as we find new ways to improve engineering speed of iteration and overall experience.
- You enjoy navigating and owning ambiguous problem domains, and have a set of tools that have served you well in creating a strategy and effectively communicating your plan to others to get buy-in and create alignment.
- You’re comfortable getting your hands dirty as a developer, and are familiar with the experience of using a suite of modern supportive tools as well as the pain and frustration when developer friction impedes your progress.
The person who will be best setup for success will have the following experience:
- You have previous experience managing a developer tooling and/or building products for developers
- You have 4+ years managing software engineering teams (experience leading remote-first distributed teams is a plus)
- You have 3+ years experience as a software engineer (Haskell/functional language experience a plus)
The total rewards package at Mercury includes base salary, equity, and benefits.
Our salary and equity ranges are highly competitive within the SaaS and fintech industry and are updated regularly using the most reliable compensation survey data for our industry. New hire offers are made based on a candidate’s experience, expertise, geographic location, and internal pay equity relative to peers.
Our target new hire base salary ranges for this role are the following:
US employees (any location): $239,000 - 298,800
Canadian employees (any location): CAD 225,900 - 282,400
*Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC.
Mercury values diversity & belonging and is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All individuals seeking employment at Mercury are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities or special needs. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.
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