Engineering Manager

We’re hiring engineering managers to help Fly.io engineers do their best work.

We’re fully remote with people contributing from all over the world. We work asynchronously as much as possible to be inclusive of people across timezones. We’re also a team of developers who are building a product for developers. Everyone here uses the product and talks to users. Engineers are grouped into small teams that are each responsible for a portion of the product. They work across the entire stack — from the UX to the metal.

Roadmap decisions are heavily influenced (and often decided autonomously) by the teams doing the actual work. Company priorities “come from the top”, and teams have broad discretion to build what users need within the larger framework. The most successful Fly.io engineers understand company goals, empathize with users, and optimize for iteration speed.

We believe we’re a stronger company when we distribute decision making power to people doing the work. Engineers do better work when we give them decision making support, and they develop skills faster by making decisions and learning from the result. This is especially true for early to mid career engineers.

When we hire engineers, we select for people who want to make important decisions on behalf of users. When we hire engineering managers, we select for people who want to help engineers get really good at making important decisions on behalf of users. As an EM, you’ll be responsible for building teams of all skill levels that “own” product development.

This role would be a good fit for you if:

• You know how to define, communicate, and execute despite uncertainty. Our team, customer base, and product are growing at a dizzying rate. Every day it seems like something we’ve outgrown is on fire. But these are “good” fires — the kind that mean we’re doing something right. Help us build the systems to do “right” better.
• You want experience building an organization. We don’t have the structure of a big company (yet); if the idea of building that structure together gives you goosebumps, this is your chance. As we grow, your career opportunities are practically endless.
• You know what makes a great developer UX. For the vast majority of our work, we find a typical triad-based approach is less effective than giving our engineers autonomy to run with good product and good developer UX intuition.
• You have enough experience with dev tools to know why some are loved and others are despised. You bring that knowledge to chaperone engineering decisions, making a dev tool people love.
• You want to learn and want to help others learn too.
• You, like us, have a lot in common with our users. We’re all developers and we all speak the same language. Our users are eager to talk to us, and you eager to talk with them and learn.
• You love building things. You know how to build and ship software, and you revel in the chance to write code. We believe the best engineering managers are engineers at heart. We don’t expect you to ship product code, but we encourage EMs to block off time to keep their maker skills sharp. There’s a plethora of things to scratch your coding itch on that also help the team, product, and company work better.
• You have a knack for finding multipliers that help your team do far more than you ever could. You get satisfaction when your team solves a problem on their own.
• You have experience managing engineers and understand the importance of glue work. You don’t shy away from performance conversations and you recognize the relationship between objective feedback and career growth.
• You love helping people develop new skills and advance in their careers. You know what everyone on your team wants to learn, and are always looking for opportunities to help them grow. We are growing the next generation of engineers and engineering leaders.
• You understand the value of a diverse, equitable, and inclusive team. Fly is used by people of all skill levels, all over the world, from many different backgrounds and with many different goals. We believe will build a better company and product with a team just as diverse our users.
• You’re more excited by potential than you are hypnotized by experience. You know that the best hires in the long run are the ones who have potential but need an opportunity.
• You’re a genuinely good human, who wants to work with and hire other good humans. You communicate with kindness and lead with empathy.

You know you’ll be succeeding in this job if:

• Your team is confident, happy, having fun, and doing valuable work.
• You are hiring people at all levels from diverse backgrounds, and providing enough onboarding and ongoing support for them to be successful.
• You’ve helped your team establish habits so the above to continue to happen when you aren’t online.
• People on your team are reaching their goals and eligible for promotion.
• The above continue to happen as your team scales, and can be replicated to other teams as the company scales.

More Details

This is a senior level fully-remote full-time position. You can live anywhere in the world; your work hours and holidays observed are up to you. The salary ranges from $165k to $285k USD. We offer competitive equity grants with a long exercise window. US employees get health care, everyone gets flexible vacation time (with a minimum), hardware/phone allowances, the standard stuff.

How We Hire People

We’re weird about hiring. We’re skeptical of resumes and we don’t trust traditional interviews. We respect career experience but we’re more excited about potential.

The premise of our hiring process is that we’re going to give you three challenges, a “work sample”, a “product challenge”, and a “work day”, that each simulate the kind of work you’ll actually be doing here. Unlike a lot of places that assign “take-home problems”, our challenges are the backbone of our whole process; they’re not pre-screeners for an interview gauntlet.

For the “work sample”, we’re asking people to write a few mock posts for our internal forum that address questions from your team. Managers here actually do this often, and you’d be doing it as well. You do this challenge at your own pace, and it should take about 2 hours. For the “product challenge”, we’ll ask you to work through a new feature proposal (no code), so we can see your product and technical skills. For the “work day” you’ll join one of us on Slack to do a pretend 1-on-1 with an engineer facing a challenge.

If you’re interested, mail jobs+em@fly.io. You can tell us a bit about yourself, if you like. Please also include 1. your GitHub username (so we can create a private work sample repo for you) 2. your location (so we know what timezone you’re in for scheduling) and 3. a sentence about your favorite food (so we know you’re not a bot.)