Software Engineering Manager

Highfive makes meetings better with video conferencing that’s insanely easy to use.  Founded by two former Googlers and backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, and General Catalyst, Highfive developed an all-in-one hardware & software solution to fix the age-old problem of why the first 15 minutes of every meeting are a complete waste of time.  We’ve got a strong team, a huge addressable market, and a differentiated product. All we need is you!

At Highfive we're working on the next generation of our awesome WebRTC-based video conferencing platform. We build our own conference room hardware, web & mobile apps and cloud service so every conversation at work is face-to-face.

At Highfive, managers are 100% focused on maximizing the return on the investment in the team-individual partnership. They design and build the system of engineering talent that produces an excellent customer product and well-rounded individuals with great career tracks. We believe that doing this well for a team of 30+ people, with each manager taking on 10-12 direct reports, is a full-time occupation that deserves the strongest expertise, focus, and passion we have in our field.

Inspired by the cross-functional squad model of Spotify and other companies, our engineering managers mostly don’t run projects, ship features, write specs, or organize bug reports, but they’re among the most respected and influential people on our team. They look out in front of the team to remove obstacles from our path, obsess over improving how we communicate with each other, design and deploy practices that optimize individual development and satisfaction while ensuring success of the team, and inspire all of us to work harder and smarter. Some current and recent projects include building our career ladder from scratch, a kick-ass onboarding program for new teammates, management training and mentorship, rolling out new cross-functional project teams, measuring engineering team velocity, and setting up a best-in-class recruiting process.

Our engineering team is comprised of software engineers in backend, frontend, mobile, embedded, real-time media, as well as site reliability engineering, QA, test automation, design, and product management. Most of our team is in Redwood City, with some other full-time engineers in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Costa Rica, and India.

Must-Have Qualifications:

• At least 7 years experience in high-performing software engineering organizations that work on hard problems, deliver technology to real customers, and never stop improving.
• At least 3 years experience managing talented engineers directly. If we asked them, they’d be thrilled to work for you again.
• Deep understanding of the types of problems your team faces, resulting from a professional product engineering background prior to, or alongside, management.
• Hired at least 12 people and fired at least 2 people.
• You’ve gotten your engineers promoted, improved their performance through mentoring and feedback, helped them navigate complex career decisions, and gotten them through times when they felt like the world was collapsing around them.
• You have a passion for making a wonderful product that customers love. You’re therefore an expert on every product you’ve worked on, and obsessed with the details. Because of this, you never blindly delegate, and enjoy immense credibility and respect among your team. You are hands-on, but ready and eager to empower those around you so you don’t have to be.
• You’ve succeeded and failed--that is, learned--at all of this.

Additional Awesomeness:

• You inspire people around you to achieve more than they assumed they could.
• You have built new process from scratch, and had to work hard to promote it culturally within your team.
• You believe in the power of a healthy, thriving culture in helping teams get the most out of themselves, and you have experience proving this.
• Some of your experience has been in startups or on small teams, where the success and failure of the greater enterprise rested on your shoulders.
• You possess best-in-the-industry expertise you can occasionally lend to the broader team in the form of technical leadership on several of these areas:
• Scalable, global backend service technology
• Web and desktop app frontend architecture with modern frameworks
• Mobile architecture and tool development
• Big data analysis and analytics
• Real-time media (audio and video) technology
• Embedded systems with custom hardware
• DevOps and site reliability engineering
• Automated testing and QA
• Build and release tools

We are headquartered in Redwood City, CA, but our team is highly distributed. We are looking for the best qualified individuals regardless of where you are. If you are in the Bay Area, plan to work from our office, but if you're remote, plan to work from home. As a company that makes a video conferencing product, we're very comfortable with remote work!