Engineering Manager - Recommendations Team Scribd
San Francisco, CA

Job Description

Scribd

/skribbed/ (n).

1. a tech company changing the way the world reads

2. a membership that gives users access to the world's largest online library of books, audiobooks, sheet music, news, and magazines

We value trying new things, craftsmanship, being an open book, and the people that make our team great.

Join us and build something meaningful.

About the team

Our recommendations algorithms are a central part of the Scribd product and one of the biggest drivers of new book discoveries. This team is using a wide variety of technologies including Ruby on Rails, ElasticSearch, Scala Spark, Hive, Cassandra, MySQL, and Redis. Our team boasts several recent accomplishments such as building a multi armed bandit system for personalized recommendations, adding millions of cross content recommendations through topic extraction, and a fuzzy matching text filter that can instantly detect two similar, but not identical, passages of text out of a database of all the books in the world. Pretty neat, right?

Here is Where You Come in

Our team is working on several ambitious projects to organize all the books in the world and use it to take book discovery to the next level which means we are building the world's best recommendation engine for books. Scribd is investing in engineering and our team is growing rapidly. We're looking for an experienced engineering manager to help guide and develop our recommendation features and the team of engineers focused on building our ever-smarter recommendation system. Our engineers are smart, dedicated, and they love solving difficult challenges and pushing themselves to rethink the way they write software. They look to their manager for organizational transparency, career development, mentorship and honest feedback. They rely on their leadership to guide productivity by removing obstacles and keeping processes lean. As a manager, your job is to keep your team efficient and executing on the right goals, to meet the needs of both the product and the engineers.

About You

You are experienced in leading, coaching and mentoring software development teams that deliver stable, high-quality software. You have a technical background, are able to contribute to planning and design discussions, code reviews and architectural decisions and believe in building teams and practices that scale. You can motivate and instill a strong sense of ownership and pride in your team. You will own driving the technology roadmap in partnership with product managers to meet business & user needs. You know and care about software engineering standards and methodologies. You know how to make this team shine and by extension, all of Scribd.

What you'll do

* Manage a growing recommendations engineering team to deliver on key company goals as it relates to creating algorithms that will ensure that every recommendation leads to what our readers like to read.
* Have regular 1:1s with the recommendations team and perform annual performance evaluations.
* Maintain our happy and healthy culture, and advocate for your engineers across the company.
* Act as the hiring manager for the team, screening resumes, performing interviews and growing the team with the best talent the world has to offer.
* Triage Jira tickets as they are filed. Ensure the important work gets done and that the engineers' workloads are perfectly balanced.
* Have a sense of a management style that works for you, a leadership approach and philosophy that is flexible to adapt to the needs and style of your team.
* Define goals and timelines, unblock obstacles, tackle questions and challenges that arise so your team can continue to focus on programming.
* Create a culture of shared learning, architectural reviews and mentorship.

You have

* Demonstrated progression in technical capability throughout your career, especially in server-side engineering creating or maintaining search or recommendations systems.
* A minimum of 2 years or more experience directly managing 3 or more engineers.
* Ruby on Rails experience is a plus Demonstrated ability to recruit and lead technical teams, including performance management.
* Strong computer science fundamentals, ideally from a computer science degree.
* Experience collaborating with designers, product managers, and other engineering leaders.
* Excellent software engineering aptitude and the ability to provide technical mentorship and guidance.
* Solid Engineering and Computer Science fundamentals, ideally with a degree in CS, Math, or equivalent experience (dropped out to build your own startup? Great!)

Why we work here

* We are located in downtown San Francisco, within walking distance of Caltrain and BART
* Health benefits: 100% employer covered Medical/Dental/Vision for regular, full-time employees
* Generous PTO policy plus we close for the last week in December
* 401k matching
* Paid Parental leave
* Monthly wellness budget and fully paid membership to our onsite fitness facility
* Professional development: generous annual budget for our employees to attend conferences, classes, and other events
* Three meals a day, catered from local restaurants
* Apple laptops and any equipment you want to customize your work station
* Free Scribd membership and a yearly reading stipend!
* Company events that include monthly happy hours and offsites (past events include Santa Cruz, bowling, arcades, geocaching, ropes courses, etc.)

In the meantime, check out our office and meet some of the team at https://www.scribd.com/about

Scribd values diversity, and we make all hiring and employment decisions based on merit, qualifications, competence, talent, and contribution, not who you are by choice or circumstance. We value the people who make Scribd a great place to work and strive to create an environment where your work is supported and personhood respected.