Engineering Manager

Poll Everywhere is looking for a Software Engineering Manager to help us in our transition from a collection of Single Page Applications to a Ruby on Rails application that uses Hotwire to question old assumptions and rethink how modern real-time web applications work. Join us in this exciting time and help guide our teams to drastically simplify our systems as we work through applying this new technology. Our tech stack includes Ruby on Rails 7, Hotwire, Tailwind CSS, Google Material Design, MySQL, AWS, and Kubernetes.

Engineering at Poll Everywhere is highly collaborative in nature. You can expect to work cross-functionally with Product Managers on product strategy, with Designers on usability, accessibility, and aesthetics, and to maintain a high bar for quality with our QA team. Engineering managers at Poll Everywhere are also coaches. You will develop a career growth plan tailored to your team member’s skills, work styles, and expectations for their future in engineering. You’ll guide their technical development through pair-programming and suggesting resources to work through or read. You’ll identify soft skills that make their technical contributions more meaningful and impactful.

At Poll Everywhere we’re serious about helping our people meet their career goals. We have a long history of seeking out growth opportunities aligned with individual interests and promote internally often. Whether it's leading a project, establishing an elegant pattern to solve a common problem, or refining an interface so users can get their work done more quickly and enjoyably, we work hard to find the right match for each person. Poll Everywhere has an excellent track record of being a place to deepen your product development and engineering skills.

Poll Everywhere is looking forward at a refreshed mission to make presentations more inclusive. We believe that having our product in use at more of the 17 billion meetings a year in the F1000 would change those organizations through the inclusion of more voices. Our platform enables presenters to create interactive questions, word clouds, discussions, and competitions that their audience can respond to using any device. Founded in 2008, we now support millions of users worldwide from educational institutions to household companies such as Google, AT&T, and Target.

Objectives of the role

• Lead and coach a team of three to five engineers to help them prioritize, build, and ship the most impactful features for our presenters.
• Collaborate with your Product Strategy partners to build a roadmap that balances technical maintenance with new product development.
• Work in the code alongside your team members so that you understand their day-to-day and bring well-informed opinions to advocate for engineering-specific projects on the roadmap.
• Expand the impact of your team, both by choosing the most important work and by continuously investing in the skills development of your team.

Daily & monthly responsibilities

• Mentor junior engineers to develop their technical skills.
  • Pair-programming
  • Code review
  • Suggesting learning materials: books, online courses, blog posts
  • Develop communication skills to communicate progress to stakeholders.
  • Develop project lifecycles skills like estimation, scoping, and breaking down complex features into actionable chunks.
• Guide more experienced engineers toward resources that will help them have a bigger impact on the business.
• Review code developed by other engineers and provide feedback guiding them toward best practices and patterns we’ve established.

Quarterly & yearly responsibilities

• Commit to and deliver your team’s contribution toward the broader engineering organization’s annual goals.

Skills

• Proven team leadership skills. You have the technical depth to mentor others as well as build trust in your judgment.
• Experience shipping production web applications.
• Comfort partnering with Product Strategy
• Experience using Ruby on Rails.
• Strong understanding of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ruby.

Preferred technical experience

• Microsoft Office plugins (especially PowerPoint)
• Electron
• Stimulus.js for user interactions
• Connection to the Ruby on Rails community
• Google Material Design for interactive components
• Atomic CSS frameworks like Tailwind CSS for consistency and layout
• WebSockets and time-sensitive workloads
• Enhancing accessibility using tools like axe
• Designing optimized database schemas
• Optimizing page rendering times using tools like Lighthouse