Engineering Manager

Poll Everywhere is looking for a Software Engineering Manager to lead the team responsible for our real-time software systems. This includes the visualizations we show in front of an audience and the experience each of the hundreds of thousands of participant has voting on polls and participating in activities. This is a cross-functional team with an embedded Design and Product Manager where you’ll lead the engineers, contributing technical estimates and helping to guide their architectural decisions while being supported by a Product Manager to frame the work around business outcomes.

We’re in the process of transitioning from a collection of Single Page Applications to a Ruby on Rails monolith that uses Hotwire to question old assumptions and rethink how modern real-time web applications work. Join us in this exciting time and help guide our teams to drastically simplify our systems as we work through applying this new technology. Our tech stack includes Ruby on Rails 7, Hotwire, Tailwind CSS, Google Material Design, MySQL, Kubernetes, and AWS.

Engineering at Poll Everywhere is highly collaborative in nature. You can expect to work cross-functionally with Product Managers on product strategy, with Designers on usability, accessibility, and aesthetics, and to maintain a high bar for quality with our QA team. Engineering managers at Poll Everywhere are also coaches. You will develop a career growth plan tailored to your team member’s skills, work styles, and expectations for their future in engineering. You’ll guide their technical development through pair-programming and suggesting resources to work through or read. You’ll identify soft skills that make their technical contributions more meaningful and impactful.

At Poll Everywhere we’re serious about helping our people meet their career goals. We have a long history of seeking out growth opportunities aligned with individual interests and promote internally often. Whether it's leading a project, establishing an elegant pattern to solve a common problem, or refining an interface so users can get their work done more quickly and enjoyably, we work hard to find the right match for each person. Poll Everywhere has an excellent track record of being a place to deepen your product development and engineering skills.

Poll Everywhere is looking forward at a refreshed mission to make presentations more inclusive. We believe that having our product in use at more of the 17 billion meetings a year in the F1000 would change those organizations through the inclusion of more voices. Our platform enables presenters to create interactive questions, word clouds, discussions, and competitions that their audience can respond to using any device. Founded in 2008, we now support millions of users worldwide from educational institutions to household companies such as Google, AT&T, and Target.

Objectives of the role

• Lead and coach a team of three to five engineers to help them prioritize, build, and ship the most impactful features for our presenters and participants.
• Collaborate with your Product Strategy partner to build a roadmap that balances technical maintenance with new product development.
• Work in the code alongside your team members so that you understand their day-to-day and bring well-informed opinions to advocate for engineering-specific projects on the roadmap.
• Expand the impact of your team, both by choosing the most important work and by continuously investing in the skills development of your team.

Daily & monthly responsibilities

• Mentor engineers of different skill levels to develop their technical skills.
  • Pair-programming
  • Code review
  • Develop communication skills to communicate progress to stakeholders.
  • Practice project lifecycles skills like estimation, scoping, and breaking down complex features into actionable chunks.
• Guide experienced engineers toward resources that will help them have a bigger impact on the business.
• Review code developed by other engineers and provide feedback guiding them toward best practices and patterns we’ve established.
• Conduct project retros with a focus on sustained incremental improvements.

Quarterly responsibilities

• Review growth plans with team members. Provide feedback on progress and course correct where needed.

Yearly responsibilities

• Commit to and deliver your team’s contribution toward the broader engineering organization’s annual goals.
• Provide promotion documentation and recommendations during our compensation review process.

Skills you need to be successful in the role

• Proven team leadership skills. You have the technical depth to mentor others as well as build trust in your judgment. If you have at least 1-3 years of people management experience we would love to meet you!
• Experience shipping production web applications.
• Comfort partnering with Product Strategy
• Experience using Ruby on Rails.
• Strong understanding of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ruby.

Preferred technical experience

• Connection to the Ruby on Rails community
• Atomic CSS frameworks like Tailwind CSS for consistency and layout
• Stimulus.js for user interactions
• WebSockets and time-sensitive workloads
• Enhancing accessibility using tools like axe
• Optimizing page rendering times using tools like Lighthouse
• Google Material Design for interactive components
• Designing optimized database schemas

Total rewards & salary at Poll Everywhere

At Poll Everywhere we offer a comprehensive total reward and total cash compensation package.

Our total rewards package includes medical, dental, and vision benefits - We cover 100% of your premiums for the basic plan and 50% for dependents’ medical enrollment. We offer a PPO and an HSA/FSA. Up to a $100 monthly company match to your Health Care FSA or HSA account.

A PollEvian’s total cash compensation package is composed of two parts: a base salary and a potential 8% company-wide end-of-year bonus on top of the base salary.

• Our salary ranges take into account a wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to: the breadth and number of direct years of experience for the role we are hiring for within the SaaS industry, based on our company size. All salaries at Poll Everywhere also have a geographic differential associated with the location at which the position may be filled.
• The hiring salary range for this role is $175,000 to $210,000 annually in most geographic locations across the United States. At the time of your initial call with our talent team please be ready to confirm your current location.

From us to you!

• 🏖️ Summer Fridays - 4-day work weeks for 12 weeks total from May-August 2023
• 🖥️ $500 work-from-home stipend to get you set up for 2023 ($200 annual WFH stipend for all PollEvians after their first year)
• 👩🏻‍🏫 $1,000 annual self-development budget + 2 additional days of PTO
• 💰$150/month internet & personal cell phone reimbursement
• ☕️ Monthly coffee and or tea subscription 🍵

Our users come from all kinds of communities, and so do PollEvians. We want to work with great people from a wide variety of backgrounds who put a lot of care and pride into their work. We're committed to providing you with opportunities to learn, and we’re looking to hire people with good judgment.

If you don’t meet 100% of the above qualifications or check off all the boxes, you should still seriously consider applying. An important part of our interview process is understanding why this position and our mission particularly resonated with you.