VP Of Engineering

ABOUT US    Valdera empowers makers to bring their ideas and products to life – we want to make it effortless for innovators and manufacturers to source the right materials from the right places. We’re led by a vision to help manufacturers produce high quality physical products for millions of consumers across the world.   Our team has a proven track record of serving some of the world’s largest Fortune 500 industrial manufacturers, CPG brands, and chemical companies. We’re growing quickly, and we are continuing to hire best-in-class experts to spearhead the next leg of our journey.

We’re currently a remote-hybrid team in the process of identifying new long-term West Coast and Northeast office locations that are appropriate for our business growth and customer geographies. We may ask local employees in certain business functions to work from the office, and others to visit occasionally for team building or customer meetings. 

THE ROLE

We’re looking for an experienced engineering leader to bring Valdera into the next phase of our product development journey. The right candidate is a high-growth leader who has a track record of directing engineering teams and thriving in a fast paced culture. At Valdera, you will continuously drive our team to deliver high quality end-to-end features for enterprise grade web applications. You will have complete ownership of engineering team processes, best practices, and technical decision-making. 

• Candidates must be eligible to work in the United States, and must also be located in the US.

In this role you'll do the following:

• Motivate engineers to execute with velocity and attention-to-detail as their top priorities.
• Recruit, develop and retain a high-performing engineers from your network and from Valdera’s network
• Drive DevOps mentality across the team.
• Motivate individuals and teams to set ambitious goals and execute towards them with a get-it-done attitude.
• Confidently provide both positive and constructive feedback to your team in real-time
• Ensure Valdera delivers customer needs on track with committed timelines.
• Be the lead decisionmaker in engineering design reviews and roll-out plans.
• Raise the bar by building and enforcing best-practices across the team (inside and outside of the codebase)
• Ensure engineers arrive at optimal technical decisions for long-term product scalability and resilience to iteration.
• Own any technical or non-technical stage of product development lifecycle when needed: idea generation, user interviews, planning, design, prototyping, implementation, testing, iteration, and scaling
• Be embedded within the team, and lead by example (e.g. by delivering features on at least a quarterly basis and pair program with engineers to help problem solve/unblock challenging technical problems)
• Roll-up your sleeves to build feature specifications and translate them into a clear plan of action. For example, you will help engineers break down user stories into clear actionable tasks that they can achieve on a specific timeline.
• Continuously monitor development inefficiencies and resolve issues you identify with the appropriate process solutions or technical improvements.
• Work with your team to develop a body of technical documentation on technical work/processes that is easily comprehensible to anyone on the team now, and in the future.
• Own our software & product compliance processes (vulnerability, pen testing, SOC 2 controls, etc.)
• Own and report engineering/product organization metrics and SLAs (guaranteed availability, bugs, test coverage, TTR etc.)

You have the following required skills & experience:

• You have experience leading a team (ideally 15+ individuals, and 5+ direct reports).
• You lead by example as a technical leader, are in the details, and develop/write code alongside your team frequently
• You know how to motivate a team to work at the high velocity and throughput required at an early stage company.
• You have experience building and cultivating a personal network of top-performing IC engineering talent and closing hires.
• You have motivated teams to set ambitious goals and executed towards them (while mitigating anti-patterns like “underpromise-overdeliver”)
• You have an excellent track record of breaking down ambiguous challenges into achievable, stage-appropriate features for our roadmap (and executing that roadmap)
• You are a detail-oriented leader who leads by example and are capable of being in the codebase/in the weeds
• You have experience independently identifying where high priority problems exist based on our business goals and aligning your team towards them.
• A long-term history of consistently making excellent technical decisions, delivering high quality features, and upkeeping SLAs for enterprise grade applications.
• You confidently think through complex systems and applications that interact with each other to make critical technical decisions.
• You can spot when technical decisions will lead to significant long-term instability or refactoring. You can also remediate these decisions with viable alternatives.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, preferred, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of work experience building software solutions
• 5+ years of managing software engineering teams
• Strong examples of your executing product/engineering road-maps to drive business growth and sales.
• Strong attention to detail: you are able to juggle, navigate and track multiple projects/requirements at once, while driving them to completion
• A sense of ownership and thoroughness: you proactively plan your own projects, follow up on action items to ensure that no balls are dropped, and meet all critical milestones
• A flexible, can-do attitude: you adapt quickly to a changing environment, pivot quickly,   are excited to try new ways of doing things
• You are excited about playing a role in building and growing a high-growth tech start-up company

Nice-to-haves:

• Early stage tech start-up experience, going from 0-1
• Have built out a team around you before
• Experience in enterprise SaaS for supply chain or logistics