99designs

As we continue to scale our technical team 99designs are now looking for passionate hands on Engineering Managers to assist in the scaling of the engineering team across the business. 

Hands on could be anywhere from 20-50% +, it really depends on your personal preferences. If tech strategy, architecture, code reviews and paired programming is part of your current (or ideal) leadership role then this is one for you! 

Who we are

99designs is a global creative platform that makes it easy for designers and clients to work together to make designs they love.

Why join now?

We are now entering another exciting period of growth with our recent acquisition by Vistaprint. What are we all about? We are a friend to small businesses & well... we are all about prints! Such as custom ordered marketing collateral, and this is why the coming together with 99designs’ global creative community makes complete sense. 

  

99designs will continue to do our thing, as we always have, but we now have greater resources to support and really drive our scaling. Also platform complexity creates interesting and meaty technical & governance challenges to solve, and there are individual growth opportunities for leaders that will continue into the future.

As a leader you will directly manage a team of between 3 to 6 engineers. These are ideal opportunities to make an impact and cultivate a growing team of smart and passionate engineers. We’re looking for compassionate leaders who believe in leadership through service, by example, empowerment and with empathy. 

The product

99designs is a 2 sided marketplace that allows clients and designers to work collaboratively on designs they love and they have a foothold in web, digital and graphic design.  

With the recent acquisition by Vistaprint, we will be expanding the platform in order to bring creative services to Vistaprint customers in new and exciting ways..  

What are these roles all about?

We are hiring for multiple Engineering managers, across the Exploration, Platform, Connection and Collaboration Groups. But what does that actually mean..? Well let us tell you!

  

Exploration - Go forth and explore! This team is centered around additional functionality to further enable the platform's creators to market themselves through their profiles and make the customer journey as enjoyable as possible, while searching and discovering the range of 99designs’ products. They are focused on the capability of searching and discovering products - showing people the right things at the right time.

There are so many things about these gigs that get us excited but the main thing that stands out would be the opportunity to work with engineers across tech like React, Typescript, Nextjs, Golang, AWS and front-end Monorepo. 

Platform - In this team we're looking for not one but two technology leaders. The platform team works on internal API and services focusing on providing developer tooling, dev environment and cloud infrastructure. This team would be suitable for an EM who comes from more a back-end focus as they own the API for all users, authentication, and integrating into Vistaprint.

  

Connection - This team focuses on scaling our  product offerings, with the goal to enable the creation of new products with ease, by not only their Marketing teams, but Vistaprint and their other partners too. You will also support the ongoing relationships with their biggest partners, and look for ways to improve those relationships and grow the portfolio of happy customers. This team is very data driven, think elastic search, real time matching and recommendations systems. Is Machine Learning a passion of yours? Well here you will be able to apply some of that potential knowledge to the greenfields work projects the team will be working on.

  

Collaboration - Within the collaboration team you will specialise in building features that will be used across all internal teams. You will be tasked with taking apart a PHP monolith and splitting it out into different microservices. In this team you will be solving design challenges like workspaces for clients and creators to collaborate, collaboration tools like messages/design feedback/on-design text annotations/on-design drawing. There is a lot of user interaction design so coming from a full-stack background with a focus on UI is a bonus!

Your role can be broken down into a few key areas...

People Leadership

• Manage team members with different skill sets and technical areas of focus across multiple development projects. 
• Align your reports' talents and career goals with company priorities.
• Create and maintain an open, positive, inclusive, and professional working environment for your team.
• Keep the team motivated and on track with changing requirements

Technical Delivery

• Set the long-term technical vision for the team in collaboration with your team members and other technical leaders in your group.
• Lead delivery of major initiatives on clear timelines.
• Contribute bug fixes or small features without becoming a bottleneck.
• Jump in as necessary to help triage and debug critical issues in your area.
• Understand and practice agile software development and project management.

Business Impact

• Partner effectively with Product, UX, Marketing, and other stakeholders to manage your team's overall product roadmap.
• Excel at getting your team to focus on the highest-impact projects.
• Understand how to balance technical debt vs business goals.
• Share responsibility/ownership for your team’s goals with cross-functional leads

A little bit about you

We are looking for an experienced leader who preferably has experience in fast growing startup environments with the following experience:

• 5+ years of industry experience
• Proficient in any one of the following tech: Golang, TypeScript/JavaScript, PHP, or Ruby.
• Commercial experience with React or other recent JavaScript web frameworks.
• Solid understanding of AWS, Docker, and infrastructure as code.
• A deep understanding of agile practices and software development in a team.
• Experience leading a team, major streams of work, or large, complex development projects.
• Strong business understanding and technical vision; you have ideas to empower your team & the rest of 99designs, as well as small businesses and creators (their users!)
• Strong ability to influence and collaborate with people at all levels.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and deriving satisfaction from clarifying unknowns.
• You have actively coached and mentored team members in their careers.
• You are passionate and want to participate in coding pair-programming, and reviewing PRs.

If this sounds good - but you’re thinking this might be a big step-up for you: we want to hear from you too! 99designs can support you with professional training, workshops, and mentorship to help your transition into management become a success.

  

What makes 99designs so great? 

Well, there’s a lot of reasons! Our people, their collaboration, their motivation and desire to help designers work across borders with greater flexibility and freedom, allowing people to create their own success, and their pursuit of customer excellence; that every customer and creative is delighted by the 99designs experience. 

  

We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team as we continue to scale - we want people to feel like they belong and can bring their whole selves to work. 99desins has a culture of workplace flexibility and wellness, support for working parents, and support for the community - including tech groups, nonprofits and dedicated open source projects. We would love to tell you all about our initiatives so feel free to reach out for a chat!

  

Alex Post

alexandra.post@99designs.com