Director of Engineering, Backend - remote

Scott's Cheap Flights
Posted 3 years ago
About the role:

As Director of Engineering, you will play an important part in building and growing our engineering team;adding to and shaping its culture;as well as coaching, mentoring, and sponsoring engineers across our technology organization. As one of our first engineering leaders you will also have a unique opportunity to grow and shape engineering management at Scott's Cheap Flights.

As the world's favorite cheap flight alert platform, we're constantly looking for ways to improve our members' experience. By hiring this role, we will be able to sustainably grow both our product and team, as well as continue to build upon our culture of feedback to maximize the individual and collective improvement of the team. You will report directly to the VP of Engineering, upon hire.


In the short term, you will:

  • Build relationships through 1-1s with direct reports
  • Hire for and scale up adjacent teams
  • Exhibit coaching, mentorship, and sponsorship to help a group of 8-10 engineers, at scale
  • Support teams in estimation, planning, implementation, and deployment of large features and improvements, for example, our from-scratch API build
  • Develop processes for effective code reviews and ongoing QA, designing a comprehensive testing strategy including unit tests, integration and acceptance testing
  • Develop a documentation strategy for knowledge sharing including API documentation and coding standards

In the long term, you will:

  • Help shape our engineering culture
  • Facilitate the growth of your direct reports to take on bigger and more advanced challenges
  • Collaborate with the product team to develop a roadmap
  • Responsible for backend systems including scalability, reliability, architecture, planning and execution
  • Identify and implement measures of engineering outcomes and improvements
  • Work with engineering leadership to come up with a business continuity and disaster recovery plan including playbooks to resolve outages from service providers or internal data corruption
  • Lead projects in a way that sustainably maximizes the outcomes from your team


What you bring to the table:

  • Superior communication skills, written and verbal.
  • At least eight years of professional software development, with at least four of those years in people management
  • Strategic thinking. You know how to design initiatives thoughtfully, measure success, and iterate as-needed.
  • Proven track record of developing talent. You have a growth mindset, and are exceptionally effective at coaching the people who report to you.
  • Experience hiring, forming, and managing a stable team of engineers
  • Deep understanding of API security including OAuth, HMAC, JWT
  • Familiar with common threats to http APIs including CSRF and SQL injection
  • Skilled in engineering principles including design patterns, data structures and OOP
  • Working experience in performance monitoring including APM, and load testing

Nice to have:

  • Remote work experience
  • Experience working within the travel industry
  • Mobile experience

Why you might love working here:

  • 100% remote work environment, so go ahead and bring your dog to work or wear your PJ's to the office!
  • Open vacation policy, with a 3 week minimum!
  • Comprehensive health, vision, and dental insurance
  • 401(k) with a 5% match
  • Up to 12-weeks of paid family leave
  • Meetup meals when you cross paths with a co-worker
  • Continuing education &development reimbursement
  • Yearly team retreat (this year we went to Cabo!)
We want you to bring your authentic self to work every single day. We accept you for who you are and consider everyone on an equal opportunity basis without regard to age;appearance;color;gender identity and/or expression;genetics;family or parental status;marital, civil union, or domestic partnership status;mental, physical, or sensory disability;national, social or ethnic origin;past or present military service;sexual orientation;socioeconomic status;race;religion or belief.