Engineering Manager

This role is remote, as is the entire company, but applicants from North & South America, Canada are preferred.

About Us

Who We Are

Sitting at the intersection of social networking and gaming, we empower creativity and connection in a digital world. Our mission is to build deep, rich virtual worlds where everyone belongs.

We have been working towards this mission for a decade. We are the creators of Highrise, the first virtual world on mobile, which has seen extraordinary growth over the last few years and now boasts over 20 million users across iOS and Android. Every day, the citizens of Highrise come together to hangout, explore, create, collect, and trade in our metaverse, and we are on the precipice of making history once again with our expansion into Highrise World.

Our Purpose

To build creative worlds where you belong.

About this Role

You will be working on the Engineering team, reporting to our CTO and Co-founder, Jimmy Xu. (Please note that if you reach out to Jimmy, he may not reply due to the volume of messages received.)

As Highrise’s first Engineering Manager, you will be responsible for leading an exceptionally talented engineering team distributed around the world. You will play a pivotal role in building our team and culture, fostering a collaborative and high-output environment. To be successful, you will need to be technically proficient, and confident creating a distributed organizational structure from scratch.

If you are reading this and falling off your seat from excitement, keep reading below…it only gets better!

Your Mission

The mission for this role is to grow and manage Highrise’s engineering organization — hiring extraordinary talent, coordinating across teams to ensure alignment, while creating a culture in which every engineer can reach their full potential through coaching, mentoring and career path guidance.

Key Indicators of Success

1. People: Build a high-performing engineering team, identifying each members superpower alongside a career plan that will support their long term goals @ Pocket Worlds.
2. Process: Define team priorities and resourcing, balancing long term and short term needs of the engineering organization.
3. Documentation: High-level problems are narrowed down into clear engineering solutions that are documented in an engineering handbook with our best practices for communication, internal collaboration, hiring, onboarding, and, training.

What You Will Do

• Manage a fully remote team of engineers across multiple time zones (primarily Europe and North America).
• Create a high-transparency, tight-feedback loop communication culture, ensuring that the entire team understands objectives, priorities, and integration points.
• Coordinate across product, engineering, and the art team to ensure that your teams are delivering the right solution for the right problem.
• Translate business requirements into clear engineering objectives.
• Hire talented engineers and develop a culture of engineering excellence that is continuously improving.
• Set your direct reports up for success in a distributed team org — enabling individual career growth, development, and business impact.
• Implement effective engineering processes and policies, ensuring best practices, iterative progress, and document the findings for new hires.

What You Can Expect in the First 90 Days

• Meet with every member on the engineering, product, and relevant art team members to get to know them.
• Be hyper-focused on your onboarding and training experience annotating your feedback so you can begin working with the people team to make it world-class for new hires.
• Present a v.1 of the engineering org chart with a proposed restructure of resources.

Who You Are

• You possess a balance of technology and people skills with a high degree of emotional intelligence.
• You are known for having advanced prioritization skills and keeping your team on track.
• You are comfortable and experienced managing a fully remote team of engineers.
• You enjoy coaching, mentoring, and supporting the engineers on your team while collaborating with other leaders and teams across the company.
• People say you are kind, empathetic and feel comfortable coming to you with difficult situations.
• You are an excellent communicator and consider yourself a superb listener.
• You care about small details and like keeping information organized for record-keeping and knowledge-sharing purposes.
• You thrive in highly ambiguous environments and convert chaos into order.

Must Have’s

• 3+ years experience working in startups or high-growth companies.
• 2+ years experience managing high-output engineering teams.
• Ability to manage a remote-first team spanning countries, cultures and time zones.
• You should be comfortable reading and performing simple tasks using all our target languages (Typescript, Javascript, Python and ?).
• Demonstrated skill as an effective mentor who is passionate about integrating a team of exceptional junior, senior and principal engineers.
• Exceptional analytical, communication, and interpersonal skills.

Nice to Have’s

• Proven track record of defining OKRs, balancing priorities, and managing teams to successful completion of projects.
• You respect and embrace autonomy so engineers can focus on what they do best.
• Experience hiring a team from diverse backgrounds and seniority.
• You always keep yourself up to date with engineering best practices.
• Doing all of the above for a mobile company!

Compensation Philosophy

As a fully remote company, we strive to have an equitable compensation philosophy that allows us to take good care of our people, no matter where they are in the world. At the moment, our philosophy is composed of multiple factors such as market pay, location, performance, and other rewards. Our compensation philosophy is meant to support our organization’s strategic plan and operating objectives — as we continue to grow as a company, so will our approach to compensation.

The salary range for this role is $130,000 - $180,000 in US and Canada. Salary will be adjusted based on your location.

What You Get Back

Benefits

• Work from wherever you want, whenever you want. You decide your location and schedule.
• Meaningful equity in an extremely fast-growing startup. (Optional / Depending on role)
• Equipment allowance so you can chose whatever you need to work comfortably.
• Company-sponsored medical and dental insurance.
• Unlimited Vacation policy. We know how important taking time off is and we encourage it. Our team takes about 20 days off on average every year.
• Education stipend. We deeply believe in learning and self-improvement. We've set aside a budget for every employee to learn additional skills and grow.
• Monthly Fitness Allowance to stay active and take care of your physical health.

Perks

• Working with a diverse team with people in over 15 countries.
• You have a voice! We love hearing ideas and want to embrace you for them.
• Extremely low turnover environment. Over 20% of our team has been here for over 3 years!
• Coworking space stipend in whichever location you want.
• Monthly team building budget to get to know your team.
• Team retreats to meet face-to-face and deepen connection.
• Bring your pet to work everyday! We love seeing your furry loved ones.

What its Really Like to Work Here

Our Culture

We are a global team of nearly 100 people right now and rapidly growing. We feel a sense of ownership over our work and take great pride in what we do. We are not afraid to make, and most importantly, admit our mistakes — that allows us to show up authentically and build relationships of trust across the board. We are the scrappy kind, so we try to do more with less, and we love that! If you were to ask our team to describe our culture, they would probably say we are a passionate group of peeps trying to impact the next revolution of the internet.

Our Values

• Dream big, then make it real.
• Be an owner, make a difference.
• Build with humility.
• Fast is better than slow.
• Keep it scrappy.
• Always be learning.

Read more about our values here.