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Director of Engineering

XWP
Full-time
Remote
Worldwide
$125,000 - $175,000 USD yearly

XWP is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all team members. We’re proud of the high levels of inclusion that our distributed team reports and we work hard to support each individual doing their best work together at XWP. 

About XWP

XWP has collaborated on some of the most ambitious and successful WordPress projects and partnered with the likes of Google, News Corp, and Penske Media Corporation (PMC) to bring richer technologies and delightful user experiences to the open web. 

Our team of 50+ experts (from 20+ countries and 4 continents) enjoy challenging work, service-focused and collaborative teammates, and many opportunities to grow and learn. We’re a fully remote team that prizes flexibility, autonomy, and trust in the workplace, making a rewarding career accessible wherever you are and whatever stage of life you’re in. We have a passion and enthusiasm for what we do and a sincere care for each other and our clients.

About The Role

We are looking for the right person to join us to support the growth of our engineering team, bolstering the delivery of exceptional software and great experiences for both team members and clients, within a supportive and growth-oriented environment.
Who You Are

  • You have a strong technical background
  • You enjoy staying up to date on the latest technologies and methodologies
  • You are accustomed to setting technical standards in collaboration with other stakeholders
  • Your natural bias is towards servant leadership and optimization for collaboration and transparency
  • Your active listening skills and empathy, cultivating psychological safety in your workplace
  • You possess a balanced blend of humility and confidence and are willing and able to build support 
  • You are highly motivated, organized, and have an execution-oriented approach
  • You have a demonstrated appetite for continued learning, creativity, and problem-solving
  • You value autonomy and have the self-management skills to operate dependably in a fully remote role

What You've Done

  • You’ve spent at least 5 years leading large scale WordPress projects successfully
  • You’ve supported and empowered others to solve technical problems
  • You’ve mentored other engineers
  • You’ve given technical feedback to engineers to help them grow
  • You’ve actively participated in hiring engineers
  • You have acquired significant and up-to-date knowledge of web technologies (WordPress, JavaScript, PHP, enterprise-level tooling and workflows)

Bonus

  • A history of active participation in the open-source software community
  • A history of active participation in the WordPress community

What You'll Do Here

Support strong engineering leaders and engineers

  • Take responsibility for organizational practices and processes and their continuous improvement
    • Creating technical standards and guidelines
    • Championing engineering documentation, processes, and tooling
    • Increase adoption of organizational tooling and processes
  • Champion learning & development opportunities for our engineering team
  • Cultivate a culture of knowledge sharing, mentoring, and professional growth
  • Coach our engineering team on personal effectiveness, great teamwork, and thoughtful leadership
  • Serve as an expert within XWP for multiple codebases and related skillsets (Backend, Frontend, Web Performance, Gutenberg) and how they interact
  • Promote big picture prioritization, clearly communicated expectation setting, and cost-vs-value economic thinking across the organization

Lead out some of our most complex and challenging large scale enterprise WordPress projects

  • Lead the team’s technical decisions
  • Have 1:1s with engineers and provide feedback and guidance, ensuring engineering teams are set up for success on projects
  • Review code and architectural decisions in various projects and provide guidance
  • Run the estimations and support the Delivery of the project
  • Assist with client account management
  • Coach and empower team members by providing support and advice on tooling when they need to find solutions to complex problems, helping them grow their technical problem-solving abilities
  • Write clear, readable, maintainable, production-ready code and provide in-depth code review to team members

Assist with engineering recruitment

  • Guide the selection of engineers for Delivery teams
  • Coordinate the continuing development of our code challenges, technical interview approach, and overall evaluation of engineers in the recruitment process
  • Maintain a WordPress and OSS community presence and visibility, growing our reputation as experts and as a desirable place to work, making positive connections with future team members


What Success Looks Like

  • Our projects deliver to our engineering standards and client expectations without requiring significant support
  • We are growing in our effectiveness estimating engineering effort for projects, delivering on time and on budget
  • You ensure the project's architecture is robust by guiding and empowering team members to develop their skills, rather than simply completing the work for them
  • You demonstrate technical leadership to clients, with the ability to clearly explain complex concepts in an accessible manner
  • You demonstrate big picture thinking, set expectations for team members and you adhere and promote the economic thinking of creating value for clients, increasing the adoption of our tools and processes from our documented best practices on projects
  • Engineers feel supported and empowered to deliver quality solutions and code efficiently, understanding the underlying principles behind our processes  
  • Our engineers feel they have meaningful career and professional development opportunities at XWP
  • You have gained the trust and confidence of the engineering team, leading by example and treating others with respect
  • You contribute to our community in a visible way, further establishing expertise and leadership
  • You’ve invested in learning and developing your skills

Payscale & Benefits

  • Trust and support from your colleagues (we look out for each other and work together towards our shared goals and vision)
  • The rewards of a highly collaborative culture (we’re a team, not a working group)
  • The joys of remote work done right: schedule flexibility, skip the commute, more time for family and interests outside of work
  • The chance to play an important part in helping XWP achieve its full potential and make a meaningful difference for our clients, team members and the open web.
  • An expected salary range of USD $125,000 to $175,000, Unleash+ allowance of $2,500 per year to enrich your life, and other benefits.