The Company
Would you like to help to create the future of a product used by thousands of businesses and millions of consumers? Phorest Salon Software powers over 8,000 hair and beauty salons in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Australia, Finland, the USA and Canada and the platform processes 7 million appointments a month for hair and beauty consumers.
Our system touches every point of the salon experience - from the in-salon software appointment calendar and CRM with a fully integrated marketing suite, to staff apps to payments. We are also the window through which the salon provides their end customer with an amazing experience through custom native apps, eCommerce and online bookings. Why? Because we want to help salons find their dream clients and get them back more often and spending more.
Phorest is the number 1 salon software brand for premium independent salons in those markets and one of our next goals is to allow our customers to easily receive payment from their clients using our software.
The Opportunity
Over the last 18 months we have taken significant steps to integrate our product into the payments space. Our goal is to ensure Phorest can facilitate any type of financial transaction that occurs between our salons and their end customers. This is a technically complex and challenging domain, and one which has a huge potential impact for the future of the company. We’re really only just getting started, and we have lots of exciting ideas around payments that we want to bring to our product.
We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to be the spearhead of our Payments group, helping to lead multiple Engineering teams in one of our most important company initiatives, the creation of a payments platform. This is an exciting opportunity for someone who wants a new challenge, where you’ll bring your experience to a supportive, growth mindset environment that will enable us to achieve our goals. You will join a multidisciplinary group of leaders in designing and building the future of payments for our product.
What You’ll Do
You will be responsible for leading multiple Engineering teams within the Payments domain of our product, including their overall health, productivity and impact.
Work with the Product Lead to translate the strategy into a set of capabilities / features that both aligns with the strategy and solves real customer problems
Work with the Engineering Manager of each team to ensure their team understands the strategy, and that the work of each time is aligned with that strategy
Ensure there is a way for each team to measure the effect of their outputs on customer behaviour, so that they can understand if their work is having a positive effect on both customer behaviour and the overall strategy
You will work with the Engineering Manager of each team to ensure an appropriate balance of new capabilities and technical maintenance are being carried out within each development cycle, so that the technical health of the platform is conserved as the platform evolves
You will work with the Engineering Manager of each team to help identify bottlenecks within the team, improve working processes, and ensure software delivery best practices are being used to our advantage
Along with the support from senior engineering members, you will be engaged in conversations with key stakeholders about future initiatives, helping to advise on how those initiatives translate to work within the Engineering teams. With you focussing on this longer term view, it allows the Engineering teams to focus on the execution of the current priorities.
You will be responsible for tracking the progress of each Engineering team and communicate it outwards to the wider Payments stakeholders, ensuring new capabilities are released on time and to the required quality standards
You do not need to write code but you will need to be code literate, and have prior experience designing and building complex distributed systems. You’ll help guide the Engineering teams to design technical solutions that are appropriate in terms of scale, resiliency and reliability.
Have regular 1 to 1s with each person to ensure they are happy and engaged in their work, as well as to coach them through any problems they are wrestling with
Provide regular feedback and periodic performance reviews
Understand each person’s long term aspirations, helping them to set goals and carve out opportunities for growth in their career that is aligned to those goals
You will attend regular Product and Engineering management meetings, where you will have the opportunity to influence decisions that affect the entire engineering group
You will help build our engineering brand by both talking about and sharing blog posts on the amazing work we do
What You Need
5+ years demonstrated impact in a similar leadership role, at scale
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a similar related field
The ability to collaboratively lead the evolution of your team’s strategy, setting unambiguous roadmaps and goals for the team and then delivering on them in a healthy, predictable and sustainable way
Experience managing people who manage others and see their role as one of empowerment and creating an environment to encourage visionaries (rather than necessarily always be a visionary themselves)
You should be comfortable coaching team members. You will communicate expectations clearly and deliver individual feedback frequently
You have a proven history of building close working relationships with your product counterparts and external stakeholders, with the ability to inspire and motivate, improve quality and productivity, while maintaining technical innovation and excellence
Strategic thinker, with an ability to to express and convey thoughts in meaningful ways in a fast paced and evolving environment, with a high degree of autonomy
Previous hands on development experience with complex distributed systems
Experience working with and managing Agile teams, as well as driving improvement across the whole development process
Experience developing and supporting engineers, and engineering leaders in their personal growth and career progression. You foster an environment where communication, teamwork, and collaboration are rewarded
Discipline and appreciation of working with TDD/ CI processes
You focus on quality, while increasing efficiency, delivering value and reducing waste
Previous experience with payments whilst not necessary, would certainly be an advantage
Benefits
Your wellbeing is important to us - we provide private healthcare, an employee assistance program and a free online GP service (WebDoc).
As part of our Financial Wellbeing, we provide competitive Compensation, an Employee Share Purchase Scheme, Pension, Life Assurance, and Income Protection.
We help you travel by providing a bike to work scheme as well as tax saver transport tickets.
We care for your family and provide Enhanced Maternity and Paternity benefits.
We grow our own timber! We provide a great learning environment including an extensive onboarding program.
Career development is important to us. We even have our own in-house Learning and Development/Business coach and many online resources including LinkedIn learning.
We don’t believe in formal dress codes. We prefer business casual.
We understand work/life balance is so important. We offer flexibility around working in the office or remotely. If you do want to join us in our office, we have an excellent city centre location which you can easily get to from all parts of the city
