Engineering Manager

The Company

What out client does? - Empower entrepreneurs

Their mission is to empower people to start and grow a successful business. We level the playing field in the e-commerce space for small business owners by providing them access to tools, automation, data, and economies of scale usually only available to giant corporations with deep pockets, such as:

• Tooling and automation for various aspects of running your business such as product data insights, invoices, email-campaigns, accounting, etc.
• Analytics and metrics for your business
• Access to curated repository of video lectures/courses from successful and experienced professionals
• Leveraging collected data to provide unique market insights, trends and opportunities
• Many more

Within 3 years, they has grown to more than 3,000 paying customers, more than 1000 amazing reviews/ranking on Trustpilot, a significant positive cash flow, no debt, and no investors or board of directors.

They are here for the little guy and will always choose to increase value for 1000 small one-person operations rather than one single 1000-person corporation!

They are an independent and closely-knit business ourselves, and plan to keep it that way:

We have no debt, no VC money, no board of directors. We are 100% self-owned and directed.

Thus, we are not mandated to maximize profits to our shareholders, but can focus on our vision of making the world a more equitable place.

The Challenge

The Challenge, should you choose to accept it:

After a couple of years of proving the concept and building our first iteration of the product, we have matured our product’s market fitness, provided proof of profitability, and are ready to enter the next stage of our vision.

Our focus will be to innovate and scale up the core solution that made Boloo successful in the first place. This is product research, which is a method to find products that have potential to sell online (such as profit and demand). Boloo is the most-used tool in the Netherlands and Belgium for entrepreneurs to discover products, and start/grow their business.

Right now, they only help bol.com-sellers with our solutions. In the future, they will empower any entrepreneur worldwide with the tools that are needed to explore and start selling profitable products. Normally this data is only available to huge 1B+ companies, They level the playing field.

In this second iteration of their platform, they will be rebuilding our existing product from scratch, “greenfield” style. We will be focusing on quality: scalable, clean architecture that is Domain Driven, clean code that is designed for readability and testability, and adhering to the industry’s best practices.

They are looking for excellent people like you to build a team of full-time, talented, dedicated, experienced, smart, engineers who want to get in at the ground floor of something great.

Day to Day:

• You'll coach, and empower engineers; you'll ensure that your team is regularly receiving and giving feedback and that they are making rapid progress on personal and professional goals.
• You'll facilitate planning: the prioritization, sequencing, and staffing of work, for your team. Right now, your team consists of five people (looking to grow our engineering/product team by 1-2)
• You'll work with others to shape how their engineering organization operates—you'll help develop our technical practices, recruiting and onboarding strategy, planning and prioritization process, and more.
• Facilitate internal communication and effective collaboration and be the point of contact for external communications.
• Communicate: You’ll facilitate daily standups, architecture/design discussions, demos, bi-directional discussions with Product to suss out and understand what value they’re looking for and how to translate that to technical requirements, provide your own ideas and feedback to Product, retrospectives, pre/post-mortems, etc. are all part of our process.
• You'll be responsible for maintaining a high quality bar for everything your team supports.
• Work with our product owner to handle backlogs and new requests.
• Work closely together with the CEO to strategize/align/brainstorm about the business demands and how this plays together with our product, technology and product team.

Location and hours

Ideally, we would love to relocate you to Eindhoven, NL to work at their office in person. We appreciate the office camaraderie and will sponsor your immigration. Of course, we are 100% remote friendly and remote work is encouraged! If you work remotely, you will still be treated as a family member with respect to benefits, paid time off, profit-sharing, and decision-making.

We are currently only looking for full-time new team members. If you work remotely, we are looking for at least 6 hours of time overlap with Netherlands working hours (9:00-17:00 GMT+2).

Functie eisen

We’re a match if:

• You are confident to represent and communicate the beliefs, needs and expectations of the product team outwards (to the rest of our client), and communicate the requests elsewhere to the product team. You take responsibility in being the leader that acts as the bridge between the product team and the rest of the organization.
• You have been/are an experienced software engineer, with experience of leading a team of at least 3 other engineers to build software products that have seen 24/7 production traffic of some scale and have taken responsibility in each phase during the application lifecycle.
• You are a leader that cares about making your team better. You enjoy and care about making tomorrow better than yesterday for/with your team. You have management skills, and thus management experience. You have experience in coaching other team-members. One clear example of this is that you’ve conducted 1-1 meetings with your team where feedback is both given and taken.
• You have a sufficiently deep background in infrastructure and technology that you can ask the right questions of your team, balance technology and people concerns, and make hard tradeoffs.
• You are able to create an environment where communication flows effortlessly and effectively between the engineering team and the rest of the company.
• You are able to translate the product vision of the company to a product roadmap, and then to reality. You are skilled at prioritizing, decision making and leading the way to achieve a goal. You like to get to the core of something before making an important decision.
• You are a leader that empowers your team to bring projects from A to Z. You understand the business demands, and are able to translate this to concrete milestones for your product team. You are able to think high-level/abstractly about ideas and strategies, while being able to translate this to a concrete planning and to-do’s for your team
• You value empathetic and direct communication and foster environments that are at once collaborative, empowering, supportive, and challenging—ones where people do their best work. You are grateful for, and are receptive to, feedback.
• You enjoy thinking about what’s valuable to customers (interest in value creation/customers, instead of only technology), and you genuinely care about making them better. This is a plus, since you have an intricate role the platform as a whole and the engineering team.
• You have good communications skills. It’s easy for you to connect with team members, both technical and non-technical. Your skills are both verbally and in writing.
• You believe that software development is more than just coding: You see engineers mainly as Problem Solvers. Coding is perhaps the primary tool, but not the only one.
• You want to have fun! We seek individuals who will help us reinforce a nurturing environment where we can enjoy and foster Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose.

Nice to Haves:

• You have led or managed engineering teams at startups before, particularly during periods of growth and organizational change.
• You have experience cultivating engineering practices and processes—e.g., code review, incident management, continuous deployment—where they didn't exist or scale before.
• You've led or managed teams that are partially (or entirely) remote.
• You have experience in software architecture

Arbeidsvoorwaarden

What's in it for you?- A not so ordinary workplace

• We got your salary covered, don't worry. Really don't. Just tell us what you want, we'll see if it fits.
• We share the profits of the company with team members, based on your role and the value you add to the company. A part of our profits are shared through our profit sharing plan. This is on top of your salary. Right now, we are also looking at possibilities of sharing ownership, since we favor real ownership in combination with profit sharing for team members.
• There is full pay transparency for every full time employee, from the individual contributor to the CEO.
• There is full transparency about every aspect of the company with all employees: we provide monthly updates on all our metrics, revenue, expenses, and profits.
• We empower entrepreneurs to become independent and wealthy over the long term, we share the same vision for the team. Our goal is to make all team members wealthy over the long run through profit sharing and ownership (+8 yrs. term )
• We are going to plant trees, and a lot of them. Mother earth is important, and we are doing our best to have a positive impact. In 2021 we learned a lot on this subject, in 2022 it's time to make the first power moves.
• We cherish our open culture. Any team member gets supported to speak up in order to improve our company. We involve the team in our vision, and support giving input on shaping the future.

Are you interested? Then respond via the application form or send your resume to arnold@haystackpeople.nl. Calling is always faster, you can do that on +31 (0)6 82 09 94 93