Engineering Manager - Timelines Infrastructure Twitter
San Francisco, CA

Job Description

Engineering Manager - Timelines Infrastructure

San Francisco, CA

Who We Are:

The Timelines Infrastructure team is looking for an excellent manager to work on Twitter's core content delivery platform. Among many things, we own and develop the API and infrastructure that powers the Home Timeline - the core feed of Tweets that our customers interact with every day. In addition, we collaborate with consumer product managers and engineers spanning the client, backend, and relevance parts of our stack, to build platform and infrastructure primitives that support reliable and resilient product features. We build the last stage of the platform before the user experience - by supporting most product development at Twitter we are constantly looking out for patterns to generalize so we can then offer new primitives to easily build products on. These primitives manifest as high scale external public and private APIs, as well as internal APIs and infrastructure that form much of the core product infrastructure for Twitter.

Examples of current and past projects:

→ The team builds out the backend for many product changes - for example bookmarking Tweets. This product API built on top of the Tweet Collections primitive (user-defined Timelines of tweets), which the team also owns.

→ To improve the speed of building products and add expressive power to our product platform, the team drove the unification and evolution of the backend to client content stream API, called "Unified Rich Timelines". This change unified the content api of the Home Timeline, Conversations, Discovery, Search, and Moments surface areas of the product (to name a few). This was a multi-year project, involving a unification proposal and design, a process for evolving this proposal for future product needs, backend support of this new infrastructure, and general support and collaboration to guide migration across the company.

→ The team built the infrastructure and platform to launch ranking in the home timeline (also called the "algorithmic feed"). This included re-architecting the existing system powering the home timeline to balance flexibility in building product features with ease of experimentation, and performance constraints. This project was a deep collaboration with our sibling machine learning and client teams, and represented one of the most foundational changes in the product Twitter has ever shipped.

→ To tackle the problem of customers waiting too long to see their first tweet, the team worked on adding advanced compression support to Home Timeline JSON responses. This work was later generalized to support all product APIs at Twitter.

What You'll Do:

Be the manager of a senior engineering team working on high-impact and challenging products, services, APIs, and libraries that are critical to Twitter's product strategy and overall site integrity. This role is based primarily in San Francisco, but you'll have remote team members in Boulder and Austin.

Work closely with product and engineering counterparts from teams such as Home Timeline Relevance, Health, Conversations Infrastructure, Search Infrastructure, and Ad Serving, as well as cultivate a strong understanding and relationship with client and machine learning engineers. You will maintain a portfolio of work balancing long and short term objectives, defend the team's roadmap, and build strong relationships throughout the consumer product organization.

Meet regularly with Timelines Infra engineers both in San Francisco and Boulder. Provide timely feedback and mentor and coach engineers with their career growth.

Appreciate our collaborative atmosphere. Give and receive feedback to build trust and transparency. Join a team where we #LoveWhereWeWork.

Who You Are:

You have strong communication skills and don't mind spending time on video chat as the team is geographically distributed (San Francisco, Boulder, Austin).

You enjoy building camaraderie between engineers and service customers. Twitter's "one team" culture really resonates with your work style.

You are comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity while still driving projects forward. Change feels natural to you and is expected.

You are open and honest and feel as though trust is the best way to build relationships.

You understand technical design documents and can articulate a system architecture in meetings with stakeholders and technical leads across multiple disciplines.

You work well with multiple organizations such as client engineering, backend services, machine learning & relevance engineering, infrastructure engineering, and consumer product management.

You are skilled at expectation management and are a great advocate for your team.

You are either an existing passionate Twitter user, or interested in becoming one. To understand and follow the work of the team, it really does help to be a Twitter user.

Requirements

* Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
* Strong technical understanding of design documents and specifications.
* Skilled at building trust-based relationships with the team and fellow technical leaders.
* Strong project management skills.
* Must be willing to travel to Boulder Twitter office quarterly to support the team.
* BS, MS, or PhD in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
* Advocate for strong software engineering best practices (e.g. unit testing, code reviews, design documentation).
* Great sense of humor and ability to build team spirit.

We are committed to an inclusive and diverse Twitter. Twitter is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, marital status or any legally protected status.