Head of Engineering

About the Role

If we are successful, you will lead the engineering team to build the public internet for the world’s non-public information — unlocking 1,000,000x more data in every scientific field and industry, and ensuring it is offered to the world as a part of an open, public information network. If the world avoids entrapping its private data in a walled garden, it will avoid this failure because you led an ambitious engineering team to open and de-silo the world’s information. And on the heels of 1,000,000x more data hitting every scientific field and industry, a world-wide innovation boom will owe a debt of gratitude to you, and to the people you led through a challenging technological transition.

Responsibilities

• Growing our engineering team from 10 to 15-20 within the next year
• Fostering the culture of the engineering team (special challenges: fully remote, distributed, non-profit, open-source, ambitious, mission-driven organization which is pre-product market fit… 1000 ways to not make a lightbulb type culture)
• Mentoring tech leads
• Working with the engineering team to cultivate an engineering vision and strategy which can deliver on the Chief Product Officer’s product roadmap and OpenMined’s overall mission (special challenges: tech transfer, integration science, cross-disciplinary across distributed systems, cryptography, and deep learning; pre-product market fit, many rapid pivots while also gaining progress over time — constantly calibrating software stability and speed of innovation)
• Final signoff on timeline estimates for features and for cultivating a team which can meet timelines (and manage expectations when timelines need adjusting)
• Ensure that each member of the engineering team is aligned to the engineering strategy — and to OpenMined’s mission overall (special challenges: our vision doesn’t have widely recognized buzz words, we’re still discovering how to describe different facets, balancing short-term vision with long-term vision focus, translating across technical and non-technical stakeholders, translating for both internal and external audiences)
• Own the long term robustness and security of the software built by OpenMined
• Manage the tradeoff between the forward advancement of the codebase and the accumulation of technical debt along the way.
• Managing uncertainty and people experiencing uncertainty (special challenges: tech transfer, pre-product-market fit, ambitious goal, many pivots)
• Collaborating with the leadership team (fellow department leads and the executive director) to create the organization’s strategic plan, including long-term, annual, and quarterly goals
• At the end of the day, you are responsible for the quality of the codebase which gets delivered to users — as a function of the culture, tradeoffs, and architecture you steward. This will probably be hard to do if you don’t write some code — but also it’s a management role

• 2+ years experience managing 2+ layers of engineers in a fully remote org — we’re looking for experience managing managers

• 5+ years as a professional software developer (or similar) — we’re looking for people who can empathize and guide software engineers
• 3+ years experience in an org of 25 - 50 people (can be cumulative across multiple orgs) — we’re looking for a member of our leadership team with experience in orgs our size
• 2+ years of senior leadership experience in a remote capacity (i.e. reporting to the CEO/ED) — we’re looking for a member of our leadership team with experience managing remote teams
• 3+ years experience with Python, AI — it would be difficult to up-skill on AI and Python while on the job
• Comfortable with both B2B and C2C software — our tech roadmap includes both dynamics
• Comfortable balancing rapid prototyping AND production development — this is one of the most persistent core challenges our engineering team faces on a day-to-day basis
• Experience finding product market fit and then scaling — this is the current chapter of our organization
• Willingness to travel to off-sites 5+ times a year (we have quarterly leadership team meetings in person — most frequently in NYC)
• Willingness to take meetings outside of standard hours — our team is remote and our customer base is global