Python Tech Lead / Engineering Manager

Lustre is a product search engine that helps people be savvy shoppers. Our technology automates the intensive research process required to make smart purchasing decisions in today's overwhelming shopping experience. We recently raised our series A from Index Ventures and have an ambitious vision to rewire commerce to empower consumers and direct the world's purchasing intent.

Python is a critical part of Lustre's technology stack, and as the Python Tech Lead / Engineering Manager, you will be taking a technical leadership position in a dynamic team, reporting directly to the VP of Engineering. This is a highly visible role, with multiple touch points up and down the product development lifecycle. You will be growing Lustre's back-end and data engineering team, mentoring and grooming junior developers, leading the hiring process for your team as well as setting the bar for code quality for Python developers within the organization.

The ideal candidate would have multi-year experience working on large Python projects in team sizes of 8-10 and have a history of technical leadership and excellence such as by being the subject matter expert in one of more areas within a company, pioneering new techniques or methods, giving presentations at conferences or contributed significantly to open-source projects.

Due to the COVID pandemic we have transitioned to becoming a fully remote company and this is a remote work opportunity. While we strive to enable asynchronous work, some communication must be done live. We primarily operate on a US timezone schedule and some availability during US timezone working hours will be required.

Responsibilities of a Python Tech Lead / Engineering Manager at Lustre

• Oversee the progress of stories as they move through the development flow, and course correct on technical issues, such as whether a developer is taking the wrong approach and helping them identify easier ways to implement features.
• Take ownership for the code quality of the team(s) you manage
• Be involved in technical decisions and PRs of higher complexity and importance and mentor developers on best practices, development methodology, and ensure quality and consistency of the codebase.
• Look out and listen for development inefficiencies such as technical debt and manual processes, evaluate their impact, and communicate their importance to PMs to schedule time to fix them.
• Guide developers on their progression as a programmer and help them learn and grow and enable them to learn new skills either by helping directly, pairing them with other developers for knowledge sharing, or allowing time for study.
• Settle development disputes and clear up miscommunications by listening empathetically to everyone's concerns and build consensus on the solution with the best trade offs.
• Oversee recruiting and be the final say on hires after taking input from interviewers.
• Collaborate with PMs to review PRDs and specs before they are assigned.
• Occasionally be responsible for doing important coding tasks that have a wide and lasting impact on the code base and improve developer efficiency and processes.
• Assist PMs in deciding who to assign stories to in a sprint meeting.

What we are looking for

• Strongly values writing well maintained type safe code with integrity checks (We value writing robust code with lots of CI checks to ensure that our code is safe, clean, and consistent)
• Has a good understanding of how to use git to organize their work and collaborate with others (We use github to manage all our projects and as a remote company having a strong understanding of git helps us collaborate clearly and efficiently)
• Are interested in keeping up with the latest frontend development best practices (We try to keep up with the latest best practices so we can take advantage of the newest features in the frontend ecosystem enabling us to provide a better user experience and write more robust and easier to maintain code)
• Are able to dive into the source code of external dependencies to resolve issues integrating them (We have commonly run into non obvious issues integrating external dependencies into our codebase, and sometimes resolving those issues require diving into open source github projects to understand what's going in under the hood. Sometimes reviewing the source code also assists in deciding which external libraries are high quality for use within our codebase)
• Are able to excel in a remote work environment by keeping up consistent communication and organizing their own projects clearly and communicating progress to the team (Remote work comes with a lot of flexibility, but to do well in a flexible environment it takes extra consideration to ensure good communication and self discipline to manage your own work hours)

Recipe for your success

• Several years experience writing production deployed code (We need a candidate who can get up to speed quickly deploying code to production and have experience with the tooling and coding best practices needed to do so)
• A degree in CS or equivalent professional experience (We are looking for someone who has a stronger understanding of coding first principals and who can collaborate in the design of our codebase)