Backend Engineering Manager

ABOUT US

At Close, we're building the sales communication platform of the future. With our roots as the very first sales CRM to include built-in calling, we're leading the industry toward eliminating manual processes and helping companies to close more deals (faster). Since our founding in 2013, we've grown to become a profitable, 100% globally distributed team of 50+ high-performing, happy people that are dedicated to building a product our customers love.

Our backend tech stack currently consists primarily of Python Flask web apps with our TaskTiger scheduler handling many of the backend asynchronous task processing chores. Our data stores include MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, and Redis. The underlying infrastructure runs on AWS using a combination of managed services like EKS, MSK, RDS and ElasticCache and non-managed services running on EC2 instances. All of our compute runs through CI/CD pipelines that build Docker images, run automated tests and deploy to our Kubernetes clusters. Our backend primarily serves a well-documented public API that our front-end JavaScript app consumes. Our infrastructure is heavily automated using AWS tools, Terraform, and Ansible.

We ❤️ open sourcing our code and ideas on our GitHub and on The Making of Close, our behind-the-scenes Product & Engineering blog. Check out our projects like SocketShark, TaskTiger, LimitLion and ciso8601.

ABOUT YOU

We're looking for a full-time Engineering Manager to join our core Product & Engineering Team who has significant experience building, managing, and monitoring backend services at scale. You should be comfortable working in a fast-paced environment with a medium-sized, talented team where you're supported in your efforts to grow professionally. You are able to manage your time well, communicate effectively, and collaborate in a fully distributed team.

Reporting to the Director of Backend Engineering, you will lead a small team of Python engineers, helping them solve technical challenges, project planning and providing other support as needed to help them build our backend services. Your team will split its time working on a combination of (a) general backend projects to improve our product, and (b) specific focus areas assigned to your team.

Areas of focus...

• Data storage systems including traditional SQL and NoSQL databases as well as advanced indexing/searching technologies (Mongo, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch)
• Reporting and Business Intelligence systems (custom implementations using Elasticsearch plugins, SQL window functions and other analytical techniques)
• Messaging and queuing systems (Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL)
• Batch/Async job processing frameworks (TaskTiger)

Key responsibilities:

• Manage and grow a team of 4-8 mostly senior Python software engineers, support them through 1:1s and continuous feedback, and support their career growth.
• Help manage our software development cycles by supporting prioritizing, speccing, and building features (our process is loosely based on Shape Up). 
• Work with other Close teams to communicate changes, gather requirements, and maintain open communication across our organization.
• Develop a roadmap for their team’s focus areas and set goals to work towards that plan.
• Help tune our engineering processes to allow us to scale and continue shipping high quality software.
• Promote delegating responsibilities across their team and sharing knowledge whenever possible (check out our engineering blog for examples of sharing).
• Help maintain our public and private GitHub repos by managing issues and projects to categorize, prioritize, and plan future work.
• This position is primarily a management role but the candidate should be comfortable with coding efforts like PR reviews, bug fixes, and other coding activities outside of critical path development efforts.

 You should...

• Have 2+ years leading a software engineering team.
• Have 4+ years of senior software engineering experience (Senior experience in other languages is acceptable but working knowledge of Python is required).
• Have a strong interest and ideally significant experience in backend technologies like databases, async job processing, messaging systems, indexing/search systems, web frameworks, etc. 
• Be detail-oriented, organized, and great at oral/written communication.
• Be self-motivated and comfortable with responsibility.
• Be growth minded and want to help improve our processes, scale teams, and take other actions that significantly improve our productivity and quality.
• Be located in the Americas or in a European/African time zone. We have regular Zoom meetings with team members throughout these time zones.

Why Close? 

• Culture video 💚
• 100% remote company (we believe in trust and autonomy)
• Choose between working 5 days/wk (standard full-time) or 4 days/wk @ 80% pay
• Annual team retreats ✈️
• Quarterly virtual summits
• 5 weeks PTO + Winter Holiday Break
• 2 additional PTO days every year with the company
• 1 month paid sabbatical every 5 years
• Co-working stipend
• Paid parental leave
• Medical, Dental, Vision with HSA option (US residents)
• 401k matching at 6% (US residents)
• Dependent care FSA (US residents)
• Contributor to Stripe's climate initiative 🌍 ❤️ 
• Our story and team 🚀

At Close, everyone has a voice. We encourage transparency and practice a mature approach to the work-place. In general, we don’t have strict policies, we have guidelines. Work/life harmony is an important part of our business - we believe you bring your best to work when you practice self-care (whatever that looks like for you).  

We come from 16 countries located in 5 of the 7 continents -- looking at you Antarctica and Australia ;-) ….. We’re a collection of talented humans rich in diverse backgrounds, lifestyles, and cultures. Every year we meet up somewhere around the world to spend time with one another. These gatherings are an opportunity to strengthen the social fiber of our global community.

Our team is growing in more ways than one - we’ve recently launched 17 babies (and counting!). Unanimously, our favorite and most impactful value is “Build a house you want to live in.” We strive to make decisions that are authentic for our people and help our customers become more successful.

Our application process was designed to promote equitable and unbiased hiring practices. We ask a small series of questions that are similar to what would be asked in the first interview. This helps us learn more about you right from the start so please be sure to answer each question thoughtfully. All applications are reviewed internally by one of our team members; a qualified application undergoes a second review by the hiring manager to determine whether a call is scheduled. Regardless of fit, you will hear back from us letting you know if we'll be moving forward.