Head Of Engineering

About GiddyUp:

GiddyUp is an end-to-end DTC commercialization platform. Our mission is to help the best products win by connecting brands and shoppers worldwide. 

We are disrupting the commercialization model - traditionally, growth starts with funding and brands need large marketing budgets in marketing, creative, media, and agencies to have a high-growth go-to-market strategy. GiddyUp democratizes commercialization - our large network of marketing partners bring innovative products to shoppers through our proprietary performance commerce platform and the market decides the growth trajectory of the products. 

Having already generated over $1 billion in sales – GiddyUp’s Partner Commerce platform enables brands to develop, launch, and profitably scale partner marketing campaigns across every online channel and international market – on a 100% performance-only basis.

About The Role:

As the Head of Engineering, you will lead and develop our core engineering team to execute on GiddyUp’s technical strategy. You will be at the forefront of our technical vision, leading a team of engineers to develop, implement, and refine our platform, product, and services for our customers. 

We’re looking for an experienced engineering leader to leverage the latest technologies in order to overcome a variety of data and engineering challenges – and deliver meaningful results. This is an excellent opportunity for a candidate looking to push themselves in a startup environment and make a difference in the e-commerce space. You will be responsible for nurturing engineers’ career growth, creating a positive and supportive engineering culture, offering architectural and design guidance in all engineering matters, defining and shaping our technical strategy and roadmap, and collaborating with product and data to help execute on the product road map and ensure successful delivery of our product without compromising on quality. The person in this role will remain hands-on and empower the team to advance and accomplish our ambitious technical roadmap. 

This role demands someone who is articulate and is comfortable working closely with business stakeholders at all levels to ensure that the solution identified is fully understood and aligned with GiddyUp’s business needs. 

What You’ll Do:

• Own the creation and execution of GiddyUp’s technology strategy including data architecture and engineering
• Hire, onboard, and develop top-tier engineering talent
• Be a core part of the leadership team, reporting directly to the CEO and founder, and contribute to shaping and achieving the company’s objectives
• Work closely with the CEO and product leadership to give input and develop GiddyUp’s product strategy
• Rapidly build a scalable platform to automate and optimize our current systems by determining what we can build in-house vs what we need to outsource
• Design an organization that can build and support a world class platform based on systems and tools to help us scale effectively
• Establish and refine engineering process: going from idea to requirements, tasks, testing and deploying them in the real world - effectively communicating progress and blockers
• Work with HR to ensure that the engineering team is appropriately resourced and structured to meet GiddyUp’s needs
• Mentor, manage and coach engineers at GiddyUp to create a high performing culture
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation, demonstrate curiosity towards new technologies and market trends, staying updated and leveraging new tools and methodologies to drive innovation within the team
• Work closely with functional/business unit leaders on strategic planning, product development, and execution
• Collaborate with stakeholders to define the product roadmap and align engineering efforts with company goals
• Develop the next generation of GiddyUp’s data infrastructure and help deliver scalable and well-governed data solutions to support GiddyUp’s platform growth
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to team members across engineering, product and data
• Collaborate with our QA Lead to implement and maintain quality assurance processes
• Conduct code reviews and establish testing frameworks to ensure product reliability and quality
• Participate in project planning and budgeting activities

Competencies:

• Collaboration & Teamwork: works collaboratively with managers, colleagues, and external stakeholders to achieve identified goals and objectives; works to create alignment across teams.; Is consistent, predictable, and easy to work with
• Communication: conveys information in a clear, accurate, and appropriate way in verbal and written communications; considers tone, attitude, and intention when communicating with a coworker, group or external stakeholder; acknowledges that one’s experience and opinion is one’s own
• Ownership: takes ownership of work, projects, challenges and outcomes; fulfills commitments and addresses blockers; Is self-directed and consistent in meeting job requirements and objectives
• Technological Fluency: is proficient in the use of work-related software, technology, and tools required to perform one or more of the responsibilities related to one’s role; stays up to speed on new technologies and leverages technology to increase productivity and efficiency
• Decision Making: resolves issues within the team and makes meaningful decisions quickly; values “progress over perfection” and ensures the team is unblocked and able to make constant progress
• Business Perspective: has a deep understanding of both how GiddyUp functions and how our stakeholders operate; has the ability to apply appropriate advising to help our organization and all stakeholders achieve desired outcomes
• Managing Resources: evaluates, identifies, and leverages team members’ key strengths, develops areas of improvement, conducts ongoing performance management and guides professional growth; sets team priorities in line with company goals and manages the activities of one’s team accordingly
• Adaptability: ability to meet the changing technical landscape, continually evolve skills, learn knew technologies, and embrace new development processes
• Software Development: ability to plan, design, create, amend, verify, test and document new and amended software components in order to deliver agreed value to stakeholders
• Velocity: the number of story points achieved each sprint

Tools & Technology:

• AWS Serverless Technologies and Native Applications
• Cloudflare Workers
• Node.js
• AWS Redshift & Aurora
• DynamoDB
• Python
• JavaScript
• React
• WordPress

Required Education & Experience:

• Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field
• 10+ years experience and 4+ years leadership experience (CTO, VP Eng, Sr Director) at a startup or established company, preferably during the team and business scaling phase
• Highly technical with expertise in infrastructure, architecture, mobile development, and devops. Strong passion for the craft of engineering.
• You’ve led a high performance engineering team from a small team to a large department (5 to ~30) You have experience hiring, onboarding, and developing excellent engineers - this is core to the job
• Your background as an engineer makes you credible to your reports
• You have a proven track record in overseeing the development and delivery of high-quality software and services
• You take full accountability for achieving company objectives and inspire your team to deliver
• You make tough decisions, leveraging both data and intuition
• You have strong outcome-orientation and delivery-focus, while keeping an eye on long-term priorities and making reasonable decisions on when to prioritize speed of delivery over longer term goals
• You’re comfortable managing/working with a team in a hybrid environment
• You are a strategic thinker, have experience building high-performance teams at pace in a start-up environment
• Direct experience working on a two-sided platform or marketplace is a must

Preferred Education & Experience:

• Advanced degree in Computer Science or related field is a plus
• Stats and/or Analytics Background
• Experience working in a startup environment
• AI/ML background a plus
• Experience working strategically with data and product teams
• Platform development experience