Topflight Apps is a hungry, product-obsessed team of strategists, designers, and developers. Together we create custom app solutions for startups and mid-sized businesses that are tackling some of the biggest problems in healthcare, fintech, and on-demand.
We currently have a team of 40 full-stack developers, designers, product managers, QA engineers, and team leaders. We are now seeking a Director of Technology. This will be a full-time salaried position after an initial part-time trial period of up to 1 month to assess mutual fit.
Projects You’ll Be Working On:
- Variety of projects within healthcare, fintech, and on-demand. Previous examples include fitness trackers, clinical trial management, loan AI, restaurant on-demand delivery.
- Cross-platform solutions for web and mobile devices in ReactJS, React Native, MongoDB, NodeJS, hosted on AWS.
- Native solutions in Swift and Java / Kotlin.
- Mixture of custom code and 3rd party API integrations, a rich admin panel with analytics.
- Data-rich solutions with libraries for elegant data visualization.
Your Responsibilities Will Include:
- Working closely with the CEO, CPO, and Director of Operations to innovate for our next 5+ years, preparing for and embracing technological change to continually strengthen our market position.
- Guiding product and development teams in their selection of tech stacks, cloud platform solutions and 3rd party APIs and platforms, both for specific projects as well as for agency gold standard. Strategic decision-making considering roster skillset, business goals, cost factors, risk mitigation, scalability, etc.
- Working with devops to optimize development workflows by driving formalization and standardization of CI/CD, DevOps, error logging, crash monitoring, automated testing, and any other best practices befitting a scalable development team.
- Setting and delivering on the development team’s KPIs (sprint velocity, QA pushback cycles required, estimation accuracy and overages, overall code quality, etc).
- Interfacing with CPO to ensure ongoing alignment of product ownership, defining workflows between technical and product management teams and minimizing friction in delivering successful projects.
- Interfacing with the QA lead to set and deliver on the QA team’s internal KPIs.
- Mentoring developers to provide technical guidance and code reviews.
- Working closely with the Director of Operations to monitor &mitigate individual burnout risk.
- Working closely with the Director of Operations to promote strong developer culture: individual innovation, work-life balance, personal development, collaboration, other values in culture statement.
- Hiring new developers by conducting interpersonal interviews and technical coding interviews, as well as reviewing take-home coding tests, across the major tech stacks that the agency supports (swift, java / kotlin, full-stack javascript).
- Providing weekly Professional Development Plans to nurture developers’ professional and personal success.
- Working with privacy officer to drive the definition and agency-wide adoption of internal IT security protocols (minimizing shared passwords, setting up IAM access, working with compliance officer to execute compliance training)
The key characteristics we're looking for are:
- 5+ years of full-stack development experience.
- 3+ years of tech lead experience.
- 2+ years of project management experience.
- A knack for consulting others on how to best achieve a feature for scalability and their business goals (as opposed to waiting for instructions on how to build a feature, or building something the first way that comes to mind).
- The ability to "figure it out" when you hit inevitable roadblocks.
- Desire for team-first approach, radical transparency, thoughtful disagreement, constructive feedback (both giving and offering).
- Desire for constant learning and a dynamic change-up in project opportunities.
- Accountability for deadlines, matched with proactive discussion of deadline adjustments.
- Mental fortitude to handle a relatively high-stress environment that comes from tighter deadlines and rapid development cycles.
- Best-in-class communication skills.
The nature of this challenge varies by the week if not day. If this sounds like an exciting and suitable challenge for you, please add to the top of the cover letter your answer to this question: "Your developer goes over their own estimates by 50%. What do you do?”