We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to head up engineering for our Payments Product at Phorest. This group owns our payments and checkout infrastructure and processes billions in payment volume annually.

The Company

Would you like to help create the future of a product used by thousands of businesses and millions of consumers? Phorest Salon Software powers over 11,000 hair and beauty salons in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Australia, Finland, the USA and Canada. The platform supports hundreds of thousands of professionals every day and millions of 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. Over €4BLN was processed through Phorest’s salons tills last year, and each month 100’s of thousands of online bookings are created.

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

Over the last 2 years, we have taken significant steps to integrate our product deeply into the online and in-person payments space. Our goal is to ensure that Phorest can facilitate any financial transaction between our salons and their end customers. This is a technically complex and challenging domain where the stakes are high. It has a huge potential impact on the future of the company. We’re only 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 live and breathe Phorest Pay, leading engineering for the payments group. Reporting to the Director of Engineering, you will manage Engineering Managers and Senior ICs as you shape and execute one of our company's most important initiatives ever.

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.

What you will do

The payments group

• You will be responsible for leading the engineering teams within the Payments domain of our product, you are accountable for managing the overall health, productivity and impact of the group.

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

• You will work with key stakeholders to understand and shape the overarching payments strategy. Armed with an understanding of the strategy you will:

  • Work with the Head of Product to translate the strategy into a set of capabilities/features that both align with the strategy and solve real customer problems. This will include cross-group alignment too.

  • Work with the Engineering Managers, Staff Engineers, 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 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 your teams 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 teams, 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 Payments stakeholders, ensuring new capabilities are released on time and to the required quality standards

• You are expected to be hands-off. But as a leader of these teams, you are going to need to understand deeply how things work. There may be times when you will need to contribute, review code and support them in designing and building complex distributed systems. You’ll be a facilitator and guide for your team to design technical solutions that are appropriate in terms of scale, resilience and reliability.

The people

• You will have direct people management responsibilities for two Engineering Managers and Staff engineers. 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 are aligned to those goals

• As a manager of managers, you will be.

  • Doing skip levels to get a pulse of the day-to-day of the people in your group

  • Aware of and designing out your managers who report into you, and their reports aspirations and growth plans.

  • Putting in place succession plans and constantly looking to remove single points of failure in the group.

The department

• You will join the Dev leadership team, which means you are a key leader and culture carrier in the development department. It means supporting the rest of the team, the CTO and the company in our mission - flexing into areas and initiatives beyond payments that may need your support.

• 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 champion the observability strategy within your group and teams, ensuring relevant service level objectives(SLOs) are set to measure and improve the payments system’s reliability. Your team will have the correct monitoring tooling in place and proactively identify and address issues.

• You will help build our engineering brand by both talking about and sharing blog posts on the amazing work we do

Who you are

• 4+ years demonstrated impact in a similar leadership role, at scale (e.g. Engineering Manager, Senior Engineering Manager, Head of Engineering etc.)

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a similar related field

• Experience managing people, ideally, managers and senior ICs.

• 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

• You should be an excellent communicator with extremely good interpersonal skills, you love coaching and supporting people. You will constantly 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

• 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

• Previous experience with payments whilst not necessary, would certainly be an advantage

Benefits

🧘Your wellbeing is important to us - we provide private healthcare, 2 Wellness Days, an employee assistance program and a free online GP service.

💰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 support the women who work in Phorest by offering 2 weeks leave for Fertility Treatment, Pregnancy Loss and Menopause.

🍼We care for your family and provide Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Benefits. 

🌳We grow our own timber! We provide a great learning environment and extensive development opportunities. We run development programs and provide access to many online resources including LinkedIn learning.

🏠Moving house? Phorest employees get 3 moving days.

😎We don’t believe in formal dress codes. We prefer things casual.

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

Phorest is an equal opportunity employer. For this position, flexi-time and working from home is possible. We are also open to remote work. Get in touch to ask for more information or to chat about your future with Phorest!

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.