Manager, Engineering

Job Overview:

As a Manager, Engineering at Pollfish, a Prodege company, you will play a crucial role in shaping the company's technological landscape and contributing to its continued success. The role is responsible for driving the engineering team towards excellence in development, ensuring the delivery of high-quality, scalable services that align with product goals. The role requires a balance of technical acumen, leadership, and process optimization to support the company's market research platform's growth and innovation.

Who We Are!

Pollfish, a Prodege, LLC company, is an online market research survey platform where data driven brands bring market research in-house for faster and smarter decision making. We have a proprietary network of 250M consumers/year which enables companies to connect with and understand real consumers worldwide in a fast, easy and cost-effective way.

Primary Job Objectives:

• Lead a team of engineers (typical 3-6) and ensure they are able to implement tasks in an efficient and technical sound manner.
• Design, develop, and maintain scalable and reliable backend services for our market research platform.
• Collaborate with product managers and other engineers to translate product requirements into technical specification.
• Mentor and guide junior engineers to enhance their skills and knowledge.
• Implement and optimize our backend infrastructure leveraging technologies like Scala, Play, Kafka, Postgres, Druid, Spark, Flink, Redis, and EhCache.

Qualifications

Detailed Job Duties: (typical monthly, weekly, daily tasks which support the primary objectives)

• Follow up engineering work on his/her team in a daily basis
• Alleviate any blockers
• Distribute work on the most efficient way possible
• Review code
• Help solidify and clarify business requirements
• Break down work into manageable tasks
• Meet deadlines
• Make sure planning meetings are efficient and productive
• Deliver feature implementations of his own, in most cases the most demanding ones
• Play the role of the go-to person for technical issues
• Write clean, maintainable, and testable code adhering to best practices
• Conduct thorough testing to ensure the quality and reliability of our backend systems
• Optimize performance and scalability to handle the increasing volume of data and user traffic
• Stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies in the backend development landscape

Additional Management Responsibilities:

• Performance Management: setting and managing goals, on-going coaching, corrective action, annual reviews, rewards/recognition, and team/individual development
• Employee Life Cycle Management: headcount forecasting, job descriptions, recruiting/hiring, termination
• Governance: ensuring compliance to company policy/practice (e.g. attendance, behavior, workplace attire), ensuring compliance to employment law (e.g. time keeping, anti-harassment and diversity)
• Leadership: ensures availability to staff, team building, building rapport with individuals, encouraging strong collaborative relationships between individuals and departments, facilitating a healthy work/life mix, solicits and applies feedback (internal and external to team), self-improvement as a leader/manager of people
• Culture Ambassador: proactively demonstrate and cultivate a culture of cooperative collaboration, strong work ethic, solutions-orientation, quality focus, results-orientation, relaxed/enjoyable atmosphere, team- and individual- celebration, and company/product pride

What does SUCCESS look like?

Success in the role of Manager, Engineering is characterized by effective leadership that drives the engineering team to develop high-quality, scalable backend services for the market research platform. The role demands a combination of strong technical expertise, team mentorship, and collaboration with product managers to ensure that technical specifications meet product goals. A successful Manager, Engineering will also be proactive in optimizing the backend infrastructure using cutting-edge technologies and maintaining best coding practices. Additionally, this leader will excel in managing team performance, fostering a positive work culture, and staying current with backend development trends, all contributing to the platform's growth and innovation.

The MUST Haves:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field
• 2+ years of experience in a relevant team lead, supervisor, or manager role
• 5+ years of experience in backend development with a strong focus on Scala/Java/Kotlin or Python/Ruby/Go
• Proven experience with MVC web frameworks (Play, Spring, Web MVC, etc.) and RESTful APIs
• Expertise in technologies like Redis, EhCache, ORMs (e.g., Hibernate)
• Solid understanding of relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL)
• Familiarity with NoSQL databases like ElasticSearch, Cassandra, Druid, etc.
• Strong experience with End-to-End and Unit Testing
• Ability to work independently and as part of a team in a fast-paced startup environment
• Proven expertise in backend development with strong experience in Scala, Java, Kotlin, or Python
• Experience with MVC web frameworks and RESTful APIs
• Familiarity with relational and NoSQL databases
• Proficiency in End-to-End and Unit Testing
• Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced and collaborative environment

The Nice to Haves:

• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-based infrastructure
• Knowledge of machine learning or artificial intelligence concepts
• Experience with streaming data technologies like Kafka or Kinesis
• Exposure to distributed systems and microservice architecture
• Experience with DevOps practices and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD)

Benefits

• An attractive salary package
• Part of an innovative tech company
• Private Health Insurance
• Company Equity
• Weekly Office Events - Catered Lunch and Breakfast
• Stocked Kitchen
• Company Outings & Quarterly Events
• Hybrid Working
• Meal Coupons - Monthly
• LinkedIn Learning & Training Opportunities/Budget
• Mental Health Benefits - Wellness Coach App Subscription
• Great office location in the city center - Parking slots available
• Gym Subscription - UP Fit
• Quarterly Charitable Giving Allowance
• Peer recognition Allowance

Pollfish lives in the Cloud, and is deployed several times a day using Kubernetes. A reactive microservice architecture underpins the entire platform. The core application is written in Play (Scala), while the vast majority of the supporting services are using the proven Twitter stack, Finatra/Finagle as well as the Lightbend Akka stack.

All new front end projects are using a React/Redux/Sagas stack, while there is also an old JQuery project that we plan to migrate in the future. Module bundling is handled by webpack, allowing us to optimize, minimize and deploy our static assets using Docker without much hassle.

Data is constantly on the move at Pollfish. From Apache Kafka, to Postgres, to Apache Druid and Cassandra, to the data-lake. Distributed programming based on Apache Spark, and Apache Flink is leveraged to efficiently handle the immense amounts of data that Pollfish has to process daily. Machine Learning and Artificial intelligence models allow Pollfish to tackle fraud, and improve data quality.

Innovation and technical excellence always need to go hand in hand with software quality and the necessary processes to ensure it. Hence, at Pollfish we always try to write testable code and deliver tests together with every piece of software that we write.

Pollfish, a Prodege company is committed to hiring and retaining a diverse workforce. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity, making decisions without regard to race, colour, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability status, age, marital status, protected veteran status or any other protected class.