Software Engineer

GitHub is changing the way the world builds software, and we want you to help build GitHub. 

We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to join a passionate, collaborative, distributed group of engineers on our team. 

The GitHub Open Source Program Office (OSPO) is working across the company to ensure that developers at GitHub and at other companies can easily contribute and use open source, as we all rely on open source software and it’s fundamental to how we build software. You will be leading the engineering team in OSPO and working closely with the OSPO product manager and designer and collaborating with other engineering teams at GitHub. That means not only creating tools and processes so that folks at GitHub can continue to maintain our own open source projects, but also creating tools so that any other company can do the same: the OSPO for OSPOs.

We are growing the team to: 

• Build tools that reduce friction in open source contributions; pilot testing them at GitHub and then scaling beyond GitHub
• Guide teams through the process of open sourcing existing closed-source products
• Support the community with best practices as they use GitHub to manage their own open source programs
• Develop core insights around open source project health and business value

A day in the life of a Senior Engineering Manager:

Our team is fully remote and distributed across the US (skewed towards East Coast) and Europe. Your typical week would include:

• Collaborating with product, data, other eng teams, the Head of OSPO, and other stakeholders (including the leadership team and sometimes entities like legal, international expansion, security, marketing, devrel etc.) to understand the problems we want to solve, how we can solve them, and what our users have said about the problems and solutions so far
• Working closely with the OSPO product manager to prioritize the team’s roadmap

• Discussing and collaboratively solving engineering and product problems synchronously via Zoom or asynchronously via Slack and sometimes Issues, Discussions, or Google Docs

• Coordinating and communicating with partner team leads for planning purposes and cross-team feature collaborations
• Communicating effectively with product stakeholders
• Conducting 1:1s with direct reports to provide regular feedback and ensure career growth and progression
• Working with your manager in your 1:1 meetings to grow yourself and career
• Working with your peer Engineering Managers in the team
• Talking with users (OSS contributors, OSPOs, maintainers, etc.) to discover what they love and what their pain points are
• Balancing the growth of a product or feature and the people on that team with the growth of your reports (we work in a more flexible way where your project’s team can be comprised of any engineers in the department; doesn’t only have to be your reports)

Responsibilities:  

• People Management
• Meet with direct reports (and other team members) 1:1 on a regular basis
• Cultivate an environment where team members are empowered and demonstrate a strong sense of ownership and belonging
• Ensure that individuals on the team are learning, growing, and advancing in their respective careers through mentorship and sponsorship
• Project Leadership
• Find and introduce new ways to help the team understand and improve their tempo, shipping iteratively to learn, and making decisions to move forward
• Collaboratively define, scope, prioritize, and estimate work

• Groom the backlog in collaboration with your PM and tech lead
• Group, break down, and edit issues such that engineers can complete them more easily

• Establish technical plans with your project tech lead and other team members for more complex or unknown areas that require definition and validation
• Work with engineering, design, and product leadership to ensure alignment and progress towards meeting milestones
• Ensure the team ships products, features, and bug fixes regularly with architecturally consistent, high quality software

• Communication and Advocacy
• Give and receive feedback to grow yourself and the team
• Drive conversations around technical issues and engineering practices, suggesting improvements and ideas as you see them
• Communicate effectively with the team and company ensuring clear understanding of the direction of the projects and the reasoning behind decisions
• Contribute back to our engineering documentation, processes, and thought leadership such that your department, org, and even company can serve our engineers and users better

Qualifications:

There are only a handful of folks who meet all qualifications. We care more about hiring managers that have a track record of caring deeply about shipping software that helps people with their work than checking all of the qualifications off. So whether you meet all the qualifications or a partial set, we want to hear from you.

Minimum Qualifications:

• High degree of empathy
• 3 years experience in a leadership role(s) (At least 2 of those years must be professional experience)
• 2 years of experience with open source
• 2 years experience working asynchronously on remote-only, distributed team(s) spanning more than 4 time zones
• Proficient written and verbal communication skills
• Experience developing a strategy and roadmap in partnership with your team and stakeholders
• Experience communicating with high-level stakeholders and executing large initiatives in an iterative fashion
• Passionate about fostering good engineering practices and processes
• Passionate about growing individuals and guiding them in their career progression

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Experience with open source in a corporate environment
• Experience with OSPOs

• Experience with Rails

• Experience building highly available services at scale
• Experience with remote, distributed teams professionally
• Knowledge of testing, profiling, and debugging practices