“Your role as a manager is not to do the work yourself, even if you are the best at it, because that will only take you so far. Your role is to improve the purpose, people, and process of your team to get as high a multiplier effect on your collective outcome as you can.”
- Julie Zhou, author of The Making of a Manager.
Few things are more professionally gratifying than empowering others to do the best work of their careers. As a Senior Engineering Manager at Help Scout (internally, your title is "coach"), your mission is to bring out people’s best. Working closely with product managers and product designers, you will ensure that your team has the proper knowledge, staffing, and skills to be successful.
The Team
The Engineering group is one of the three-piece ensemble, along with Product and Design, that makes up our 56-person Experience Organization at Help Scout. You will be coaching engineers across two different teams and will be part of our 7 person Engineering leadership group that includes our CTO, Denny Swindle. You will report to our VPE, Megan Chinburg.
Engineers on your team(s) will be members of cross-functional groups that are working on mission-aligned projects and initiatives. You’ll partner with Product and Design to empower Engineers to improve their craft, understand and empathize with our customers, identify risks, and determine milestones. You’ll be a passionate catalyst for change that results from your team’s iteration and project retrospectives.
About the role
- You’ll be working with product people that challenge you to grow every day, including leaders in Design and Product. The founders and leadership team are technical and committed to creating a magical experience for our customers.
- You will deliver value to your team members by providing them with growth opportunities, balanced feedback, and support that promote their career goals.
- Ultimately an engineer’s success within a team is a measure of your success as a coach. When they are doing their best work, and you provide thoughtful coaching and mentorship without being too hands-on, that’s how you know it’s working.
- Our teams are organized and committed to Lean Flow, and part of your job is to support, coach and reinforce this, and highlight and correct for anti-patterns to our agreed upon practices.
- You will partner with Product Managers to co-create the roadmap for your team(s), helping to plan the strategic technical initiatives that will be required to support future customer solutions.
- You will be responsible for identifying and anticipating future staffing needs, and proactively engaging and partnering with our Talent team to support our hiring practices.
- Everything is secondary to the customer experience. We expect every engineer to have a keen sense of how their code will impact that experience with respect to performance, availability, security, usability and accessibility.
Time Zone note
- Given that we have remote team members living between EET through CST time zones, we prefer that your regular working hours be around 8AM - 5PM ET to ensure several solid blocks of overlap time with your team members.
About you
- You’ve managed senior engineering teams before and are no stranger to what it takes to help your team achieve great things.
- In the past you’ve been a successful engineer. However, your real passion has been leading, mentoring, and coaching people to accomplish great things. Your other passion is helping your team evolve to the next stage in their careers.
- You default to non-defensive listening and believe in leading with with humility and vulnerability. You naturally build excellent relationships with your team and peers.
- You are an outstanding communicator, both verbally and in writing. In a remote team, your writing skills are critical to your success in this role.
- You lean in to having difficult conversations with people to resolve a situation and do what is right. You understand the value of direct, transparent, respectful feedback and know that it’s a gift your teammates can use to grow and develop their super powers.
- You know how to absorb ambiguity and spread clarity;you can distill and connect the big picture goals to the day-to-day work of your team and can help them understand the larger impact of their work.
- You are extremely thoughtful when it comes to hiring people for your team, and work actively to identify your team’s growth areas. You prioritize hiring someone that is a long-term compliment to the team versus someone who works and thinks like everyone else.
- You believe diverse teams are critical for high performance and understand the value of fostering an inclusive environment for your team to thrive. You understand the important impact you can have as a coach on DEI efforts in hiring and promoting team members.
- You believe remote teams are the future of work, and have experience working with remote teams or can adjust your work/management style to be remote-friendly.
Benefits
Competitive salary - Our salary formula is public to all employees (but doesn't divulge your specific salary) and we update it at least once per year. Your salary is the same no matter where you live. Our goal is to pay at or above the market rate of a US-based tech hub like Boston or Seattle.
Health and dental insurance - We cover you and your family's health/dental insurance 100%. If you are based in the US, we'll cover you on our Aetna policy. If you're based outside the US, we'll reimburse your out-of-pocket health and dental insurance costs.
Long-term/short-term disability insurance &life insurance - we cover 100% of the premiums for LT/ST disability insurance and base life insurance. You also have the option to purchase supplementary life insurance through our provider (currently US only).
Flexible vacation - Take time off when you need it! We recommend 3-4 weeks in addition to public holidays, but there are no firm rules. We trust you.
Sabbatical - After you've been at Help Scout for 4 years, you get a month of paid vacation (in addition to regular vacation) and $2,500 to spend towards travel, learning, projects or anything else during your time off. Read about what our CEO did.
Paid parental leave, including adoption - 12 weeks of paid leave for all new parents.
401k with 1% match- via Betterment for Business (currently US only)
Personal Development stipend - Up to $1,800 per year to improve your craft
Set you up for success — we’ll get every new teammate a Mac laptop or equivalent of their choice, and provide a $1500 stipend so you can feel ready to work from home. We also cover up to $350 USD per month if you'd like to rent a co-working desk somewhere.
Complete transparency - Everyone has full access to business metrics and financial information about the company.
About Us
Help Scout is made by roughly 110 people in 80+ cities around the world, all with a passion for helping others. We come from diverse backgrounds and are united by an enthusiasm for great products and delightful customer experiences. Help Scout launched in 2011 and today we have more than 10,000 paying customers in 140+ countries.
Why Help Scout?
We're remote. It doesn’t matter if you’ve worked remotely before — we’ve been doing it for nearly a decade and are helping to write the playbook — we’re happy to show you the ropes. Most folks that get a taste of working in a "remote first" company have a hard time going back to the old way of doing things.
We’re passionate about diversity and inclusion. The data is abundantly clear about diverse teams being more successful, and we're dedicated to setting the team up for success. Today our leadership team is 62% women, and that's just the start. Here's our DEI Dashboard where you can see all of our team demographic data and read about our commitment to this work.
We're committed to SMBs for the long term. Help Scout is focused entirely on serving small and midsize businesses, typically up to 500 employees, because those companies view customer service differently. It's not a cost to be optimized, it's their most effective marketing tool and a key differentiator from the competition. We built Help Scout for companies that truly value being customer-centric (like us) and want a product that shares their values.
We're leaving the world better than we found it. Did you know Help Scout is a certified B Corporation, with a mission to give away at least 1% of our product through Help Scout for Good? Our company exists not just to help ourselves, but to invest in our team, our customers, our community, and our environment.
Our commitment to you
We are an equal opportunity employer and are committed to building a company that embraces and celebrates diversity and inclusion. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We have read the studies and understand that diverse teams build better products, bring more perspective to the table, contribute to a company’s financial success and help foster a more inclusive environment for all employees, but the bottom line is that it's the right thing to do.