Full-Time Director of Engineering
Job Description
About Us
UpTogether is a national organization of individuals across the country with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and identities who share a passion for social justice and racial equity. Our mission is to recognize, highlight and invest in the ingenuity and entrepreneurship of people in undervalued communities and partner with government and philanthropy to do the same.
After working with thousands of families since our founding in 2001, at UpTogether, we are certain people don’t live in poverty because they are lazy, uneducated, or mismanage money, as stereotypes would indicate. Instead, the poverty cycle, which disproportionately impacts Black and Latinx communities, can be traced to well-intentioned but inadequate governmental and charitable policies and practices that rely on a traditional top-down approach.
UpTogether’s Strengths Based Approach (SBA) includes:
- Community: We honor the strengths and initiatives of people living in undervalued communities and promote the role social networks within these communities play in helping people accomplish their goals and achieve long-term socioeconomic mobility.
- Capital: We invest in our members with unrestricted cash in recognition of the initiatives they are taking to improve their lives.
- Choice: We trust that people in undervalued communities know what’s best and are capable of making decisions for themselves and their families.
UpTogether reveals and accelerates the initiative people are taking to improve their lives. As a community, a movement, and a platform, we use the power of information—compelling insights and personal success stories—to transform stereotypes, beliefs, practices, and policies. Together with our members, we are championing a community-led movement to boost economic and social mobility in communities that have been undervalued and underinvested in for far too long.
At UpTogether, we work towards these values:
- Community: We honor the strengths and initiatives of people living in undervalued communities and promote the role social networks within these communities play in helping people accomplish their goals and achieve long-term socioeconomic mobility.
- Impact: We test and scale strategies for systems adoption of a strength-based approach to accelerate socioeconomic mobility for people living at or below the poverty line in the U.S.
- Collaboration: We center the lived experiences of families in undervalued communities and engage the knowledge, experience, and perspectives of our board, partners, and staff to build and grow a strength-based approach to end poverty.
- Racial Equity: We are committed to being an anti-racist organization, and we promote anti-racist policies that eliminate the racial wealth divide.
- Leadership: We acknowledge that leadership is not based on a title and honor the many forms in which it appears. We celebrate leadership that embodies all of our organizational values, driving us to act against the dominating deficit-based approach to fighting poverty.
- Choice: We trust that people living at or below the poverty line know what’s best and are capable of making decisions for themselves and their families.
The Position
We are seeking an Engineering Director to cultivate a healthy and high-performing engineering team, and ensure the delivery of high-quality software that creates the impact UpTogether is aiming to achieve. This role will take technical ownership of all front-end and back-end technologies, demonstrate and evangelize best practices for the rest of the engineering team, and ensure only high-quality code gets shipped to production. This is a hands-on director position that will spend significant time mentoring other engineers and reviewing their contributions, providing vision and direction for UpTogether’s technical infrastructure, and contributing engineering insight into key cross-functional projects.
While we use a number of technologies (listed below), specific knowledge of each technology is less important than a strong grasp of core engineering concepts (MVC, OO, REST, etc) and an eagerness to always be learning new languages, frameworks, and techniques!
This is a 100% remote position (must be based in the United States. A reliable internet connection and functional work environment, including a fully functional computer (laptop or desktop) with video conferencing capabilities, are required to be successful in this role. UpTogether offers reimbursements and stipends for work-related equipment for full-time staff.
Responsibilities
Ownership of UpTogether’s technological infrastructure
- Back End
- AWS; including EC2, S3, Lambda
- Linux / Ubuntu servers
- Python and Flask services
- Job orchestrators and schedulers such as Airflow, AWS StepFunctions, etc.
- Event Streaming platforms such as Kafka/Redis
- GraphQL
- Integration with payment systems like Stripe, Virtual Incentives
- Front End
- Javascript, Vue and Nuxt
- REST/GraphQL clients for data access
- General
- PostgreSQL
- GIT
- Docker
Cultivating a healthy and high-performing engineering team at UpTogether
- Conducting regular 1:1s with direct reports and ensuring direct reports have what they need to be successful
- Providing regular coaching and periodic performance evaluation
- Ensuring the team is focused on the highest priority work and that projects are scoped, tasked, and estimated effectively
- Setting standards, and practices, and taking ultimate responsibility for ensuring the team is delivering high-quality working software that delivers values to our end users
- Conducting regular retrospectives to continuously improve and learn together
Collaborating effectively across UpTogether Departments
- Partner closely with Product and UX teammates to ensure we are building the right things to further UpTogether’s mission
- Identifying people, processes, and technology needs and opportunities and sharing them with peers on other teams so that we are improving and learning together
- Providing technical perspective and insight on new initiatives
Qualifications, Attributes & Skills Requirements
- At least 5 years experience as a software engineer, engineering manager, or equivalent, including at least 2 years of people management responsibility
- Experience architecting & shipping at least one large-scale production application
- 2+ years of experience leading, developing & mentoring engineers
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills
- Highly organized and able to balance management and engineering tasks
- Ability to lead by influence: coaching, mentoring, creating and reinforcing culture, and setting an example by your actions
- Experience building and leading diverse team
Ideal Candidate
- Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science/Engineering
- Opinionated and able to discuss/argue/articulate technology decisions, patterns, and practices. Ability to be persuasive, but also lose gracefully
- Experience with building and maintaining front-end web framework deploys
- Experience shipping production mobile (native) apps
- Ability and willingness to learn new technologies as needed
- Self-starter who wants to coach and develop an internal team, provide critical insight to UpTogether’s non-technical teams, and further UpTogether’s mission
- Be involved in all phases of a project (design, build, test, deploy, and maintain)
- Proven ability to thrive in a remote work environment; self-directed; proactively reaches out; responsive; comfortable in a virtual setting
- Ability to thrive in a fast-changing environment, flexible in the pursuit of goals
- Demonstrated commitment to, or passion for, our mission; deep belief and trust in the innate capabilities of low-income families and communities; willingness to engage in conversations aimed at addressing erroneous stereotypes about low-income people and people of color
- A deep belief in and operates according to UpTogether’s Core Values
- Strong command of office utilities (e.g. Google Workspace, etc.) to document and share information internally”
Compensation
This is a full-time position with a competitive benefits package, including medical, dental, vision, 401(k), and vacation. The salary range is commensurate with experience between $130,000–$170,000 annually.
Inclusion Statement
We strive to create a community that embraces equity, diversity, and inclusion, and we support the efforts of others to build such communities. We encourage all qualified and interested persons to apply, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.
How to Apply
To Apply
To be considered for this opportunity, please submit a resume and cover letter via this link here. Your cover letter should outline how your personal and/or work history will contribute to the mission of UpTogether. We ask that you do not include a photo or image of yourself on your resume or cover letter. Applications submitted without a cover letter will not be considered.
215 total views, 0 today