Head of Product Engineering

ABOUT THE ROLE

We’re currently looking for a Head of Product Engineering to join our Product team (made up of 2 Software Engineers, 2 Product Managers, Product Director and soon an in-house UX/UI Designer). Reporting to our Product Director, you’ll work across Founders Pledge, forging and developing digital solutions, providing a world-class service to our members. This is a fantastic opportunity for somebody looking to take us from 0 to 1, setting our tech foundations and working across varied projects, with a small, dedicated team.

We’re currently building a brand-new web app that supports our ‘real-life’ member journey, taking our members from signing a binding pledge to making grants to their chosen charities. You’ll oversee our app development plus maintenance of our website and member area.

You’ll work across:

• Product & Business thinking: As our most senior engineer, you’ll be a thought partner for the Product team, helping to carve out our roadmap with your expertise, deciding when to complete work in-house and when to outsource (when to build vs buy).
• Getting projects over the line: You’ll write code and build features to ensure project completion. You’ll learn new skills to provide aircover where needed.
• Engineering Leadership & Line management: You’ll make decisions on our architecture, DevOps, Security, Data Protection and Observability. You’ll set the bar for the engineering standard at Founders Pledge, with a commitment to making our offering scalable and world-class.

You’ll be involved with:

• Cross-functional calls on how to automate a step in our grant making process, for the benefit of our internal team and member experience. You’ll share your product ideas and provide technical options.
• Designing a technical solution along with teammates, breaking tasks down into digestible chunks, or pair programming.
• Working with our Impact Analytics team to understand their data needs (in both the short and long term), e.g. ‘we need to show x data on the member app,’ then proposing solutions.
• Building new product features, (e.g. a lean login flow for our web app), then getting feedback from our PM, before deploying into production.
• Helping to groom new tasks, providing considerations from both a technical and product perspective, proposing changes to the spec and design where necessary.
• Working with the Product Director to prioritise our backlog, ensuring a balance between new development velocity and progress on critical technical work.
• Reviewing code and QAing a change to our homepage.
• Coaching a new engineer in the team (your direct report) and setting their professional development goals.
• Overseeing any technical implementation by an external agency.
• Responding to a production incident by fine-tuning our architecture, engineering and/or testing approach.

Salary: £80,000 - £90,000

Location: UK, Europe (Flexible remote)

ABOUT YOU

Overall, we’re looking for a seasoned engineer with leadership experience. You’re a problem solver - you love independently thinking through product/engineering problems, leaning on your team where necessary, for the best outcome. You care deeply about making the right Product decisions and yearn to understand more about business strategy and how tech can support this.

You’re likely to have...

• Previous experience as a full-stack or back-end engineer.
• A keen desire to help shape and build optimal systems, processes and solutions - it’s crucial to understand how everything fits together at Founders Pledge.
• Leadership experience - you’ve brought the best out of engineering teams and facilitated teams through change.
• Strong professional experience in the fundamentals of web development technologies, e.g. HTTP, HTML, JavaScript, CSS.
• Experience working on a complex product/as part of a product team.
• Experience integrating and getting the best out of third party tools/SaaS products (e.g. CMS platforms, SalesForce).
• Experience working with essential internal tooling/internal products, as well as the customer-facing elements.
• Ability to write clear RFCs, digestible by both engineers and non-engineers - you’ll work with many teams/functions at Founders Pledge.
• An understanding of the limitations of your knowledge. When you know ‘what great looks like,’ you’ll make a recommendation. Otherwise, you’ll highlight the issue and find the information you need….

And finally, our tech stack:

We’re using modern technologies such as Netlify, Nuxt.js, Tailwind, and GraphQL. We also maintain our current website and member area, built on Ruby on Rails and AWS. Our documentation is open for public consumption.

• We mostly write in TypeScript and Ruby
• For data storage we use PostgreSQL, Redis, and Salesforce
• Most of our infrastructure in on AWS
• We also interact with SalesForce to store and retrieve members’ data

WHY WORK WITH US?

You can find more about the benefits we offer here, but what makes us truly special is both our mission and our people. We’re a diverse team, from both charitable and commercial backgrounds, who believe that amazing things can happen when we tackle problems together. We offer a flat structure and an opportunity to help shape the future of philanthropy.

Even though we’re an incredibly mission-driven company and we’ve got big ambitions, we won’t be expecting you to work all-nighters! We work a 40-hour working week and actively promote work/life balance.

On top of this, we have a global flexible first approach to working.

We ask that applicants to this role are based within the UK or Europe. Although we have a small HQ in London, there’s no expectation for you to attend on a regular basis. At the same time, if you think you’d benefit from a desk in a co-working space close to your home, this can be arranged. Otherwise, you just need a great home wifi connection and we’ll provide you with everything else you need to be successful in your role.

On top of this, we’ll bring the global team together once per year and individual teams will meet to work together once per year (when it’s safe to do so)!

We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at Founders Pledge. We seek people with different strengths, experiences and backgrounds, who share our drive to understand and solve complex social challenges. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Finding solutions to the world’s most pressing problems requires different perspectives and unique ways of thinking and we are committed to building an inclusive and diverse workplace where everyone can do their best work.