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 9,000 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.

The Opportunity

We are taking on an ambitious product rebuild of our core user interface. You will be joining the salon operations group, building exciting new features as we continue our move towards modern web technologies. You will work with GraphQL and a modern Ember.js frontend stack, with a new design system based upon Tailwind.

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to head up a new team, working with other folks in the group on accelerating one of our most important company initiatives, the advancement to web technologies. You will get stuck in and design, architect and contribute to codebases as you shape a team of existing and new Phoresters.

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 technology, product and design folks in building the future of the hair and beauty industry.

What You’ll Do

• You will be responsible for leading an Engineering team within the Salon operations domain of our product, including their overall health, productivity and impact.

• You will work with Engineering Managers, Product Leads and other key stakeholders to understand and shape the overarching payments strategy. Armed with an understanding of the strategy you will:

  • 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 Managers, Principal Engineers and others in the group to ensure their team understands the strategy, and that the work of each team is aligned with that strategy

  • Ensure there is a way for your team to measure the effectiveness of their outputs on customer behavior, 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 your team to ensure an appropriate balance of new capabilities and technical maintenance is being carried out within each development cycle so that the technical health of the platform is conserved as the platform evolves

• Help identify bottlenecks within the team, improve working processes, and ensure software delivery best practices are being used to our advantage

• You will be responsible for tracking the progress outwards to the wider teams, ensuring new capabilities are released on time and to the required quality standards

• There is going to be hands-on work here, as a leader of this team you are going to need to understand how things work, there will be times where you will need to contribute to the team's work, review code and support them in designing and building complex distributed systems. You’ll help guide your team to design technical solutions that are appropriate in terms of scale, resilience and reliability.

• You will have direct people management responsibilities. This will require you to:

  • 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

• Strong proficiency and at least 5 years of professional experience with object-oriented software design - (for example Java, Kotlin, Ruby)

• Discipline and appreciation of working with TDD / CI processes.

• Experience designing distributed services that can communicate in a fault-tolerant manner using both RESTful and message-driven APIs.

• 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

• 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 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 in their personal growth and career progression. You foster an environment where communication, teamwork, and collaboration are rewarded

• You’ll focus on quality, while increasing efficiency, delivering value and reducing waste

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..

• 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

Want to learn more about Phorest and our interview process? Check out nothingventured.rocks for our blog and Insights on building an evergreen company from the team here at Phorest.

Phorest is an equal opportunities employer and we value diversity at our company. Phorest does not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation or any other category protected by law.

Research shows that while men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other marginalised folks tend to only apply when they check every box. So if you think you have what it takes, but don't necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still get in touch. We'd love to have a chat and see if you could be a great fit.