Job Description
As Vox Media's Head of Engineering, you will lead a 70-person and growing engineering team, and partner with your counterparts in Product and Design to lead the 130-person cross-functional Vox Media Product organization. This role balances strategy, formulating and communicating a technology vision that is aligned with the priorities of the business, with execution, assembling the right team, processes, and plans to deliver.
What you'll do:
• Lead the engineering team, ensuring it is organized, managed, informed, and resourced to effectively execute against the company's product priorities. Direct, support, and collaborate with your engineering directors and chief architect to ensure the team, processes, and plans are strong.
• Understand Vox Media's overall strategy and goals as well as uncover opportunities. Partner with COO to build relationships with company leaders and stakeholders so that you are not just advocating for ideas, but identifying and building organizational support for solutions.
• Translate business priorities into technology execution as part of the product leadership team. Collaborate with the Head of Product and Head of Design to formulate and communicate a technical vision and strategy that meets the ambitions of the business and optimizes how our cross-functional teams work together.
• Help define and communicate a bold but realistic architecture vision. Ensure engineering teams have a shared mental model of and are working toward an architectural vision that supports the company's strategic goals. Empower engineers by helping them understand how their own piece of the puzzle fits into the larger Vox Media universe.
• Attract, hire, and retain diverse, world-class engineering talent. Create an inclusive and respectful culture where great software engineers want to work. Make sure Vox Media is catching the attention of the talented engineers we need to hire.
• Define the way engineering gets done at Vox. Guide the selection and implementation of development methodologies, collaboration tools, code and documentation standards, source control usage and code review guidelines, and so on. Create and evolve organizational structures and processes as the team grows.
• Plan large-scale engineering projects. Make sure functional requirements translate into actionable and pragmatic implementation plans with delegation and hands-on contributions. Ensure engineering teams take a safe and direct path from idea to shippable software, balancing the short-term pressures to build things fast with the long-term imperative to build things right.
• Advocate for the needs of the engineering team. Ensure engineers have the tools, processes, environment, and engineering culture they need to be satisfied and successful in their work.
• Stay up to date with the media technology landscape. Evaluate whether new tech or approaches could play a role in Vox Media's technical strategy. Develop and maintain relationships with key industry leaders and vendors.
• Contribute to company-wide initiatives as a member of Vox Media's senior leadership team.
What you'll bring:
• Experience managing and enabling a 50+ engineering organization, including empowering engineering leaders to deliver against ambitious goals
• Experience managing with OKRs or another goal-setting framework in the context of a cross-functional organization
• Experience overseeing a large-scale system architecture and evolving it by defining a technology vision and business context for your teams
• Experience working in highly cross-functional and matrixed organizations, including working with executives and senior leadership across multiple departments
• An understanding of how to plan and manage a budget, including experience making difficult trade-offs where necessary
• A passion for building and organizing excellent cross-functional teams.
Bonus points for:
• A background in media technology, e.g., content management systems and ad tech.
• Familiarity with one or more of the Vox Media portfolio of editorial brands.
Vox Media is dedicated to the health and wellbeing of all of our employees. All employees in our offices are required to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Please note that our Recruiting Team will only contact you from @voxmedia.com email addresses, and we will never contact you via text message.
Jobcode: Reference SBJ-g335e9-44-223-37-137-42 in your application.