Product Engineering Team Leader

We're a small, high-performing, diverse, tight-knit team with a mission to radically improve mainstream science education at schools. By creating the best science lessons in the world, coupled with intuitive tools that allow teachers to take advantage of the latest pedagogies, we've already helped millions of students in Australia get excited about science.

Young people all over the world deserve a world-class science education. Stile is on a mission to ensure that students are able to critically evaluate what they see in their social media feeds, and feel confident using science and technology to solve the big issues of tomorrow. Every week over 250,000 students and their teachers use Stile's web platform to explore and analyse the science behind the big issues facing us globally, a number we expect will more than double in the next couple of years as we expand internationally.

Stile is used in 1 in 3 Australian secondary schools, with around 45% of year 7-10 students subscribed. That's quite some reach, and it's a responsibility we take extremely seriously. When you join our small team, you have a unique opportunity to have a massive impact on the future of science education.

We're looking for a new Product Engineering Manager. Working directly for our Head of Product Engineering, and closely collaborating with our CTO, you'll be responsible for delivering awesome science education in Australian (and increasingly American) schools. You'll embrace and improve our excellent engineering practices, delivering delightful, reliable, maintainable tools for teachers at a high cadence. This is a fantastic opportunity for team leaders and senior technical leaders to step up into a high level technical director role.

At the most basic level, it's to get kids thinking again. Thinking critically about the world around them, and making evidence-based decisions for themselves and their community. It's definitely worth a look at why we do what we do. We replace what kids learn in their science classrooms with something far more modern, engaging and relevant. Our platform is held in high esteem in schools, but we're busting to ship new features we can see will meaningfully help teachers support their students, far beyond anything they can do with classroom technology today.

You'll be in charge of how we build our most critical new features. In your first year, you'll help us:

• Transform student results into insights about their literacy, numeracy, critical skills, and knowledge so that teachers can intervene faster and more effectively
• Build more amazing interactive simulations that let students explore the processes that they're learning about
• Make our content even more accessible by using AI to help our writers provide lower literacy-level hints and scaffolding for students that need it

We make sure that our engineers time isn't wasted. We provide:

• A highly-motivated and talented team with experienced engineers, and passionate new starters
• A genuine commitment to the professional development of each engineer through training, coaching, mentorship opportunities, regular feedback and increasing responsibility
• Quality over quantity: we're pragmatists, but we already have an established business that's here for the long term, so maintenance matters more than up-front build time. We'd rather build it right than live with something broken.
• A near-continuous release cadence, involvement of engineers in the design process, and a willingness to take calculated risks
• A large base of real customers, which is growing rapidly as we expand overseas. When you ship a feature 100,000 students will see it within the next day
• Enormous respect for our employees' work-life balance reflected in our parental leave policy, individual flexibility and sustainable project pace
• A mission that drives our company, and a strong sense of ethics in everything we do
• A modern tech stack. AWS. Terraform. Rust for tooling. CI on Buildkite. An API written in Ruby and Sorbet (not Rails), with a frontend in React and Typescript, glued together with Protobuf interfaces
• Great documentation
• A culture of asking 'how should this work?' rather than 'what's easiest?'
• Extremely thorough test coverage, extensive use of live configuration and feature switching, and a rigorous CI and merge queue process that delivers provably working code rapidly
• High standards: we love solutions that Just Work, and are prepared to spend the effort to build them
• Our comprehensive suite of observability tools let's you see how your changes are performing, and gives you the detail you need to spot trends, anomalies, and patterns easily
• Stile is owned and led by engineers. Our CEO, CTO, and founder/majority-owner/chair — Alan Finkel — are all engineers, and understand what it takes to build something great. Great engineering gets noticed, and rewarded

You'll responsible for leveraging our existing strengths, and running an engaged, effective engineering team who love solving problems for teachers.

• You lead by example, enjoying an opportunity to get your hands dirty
• Your vision is infectious and excites everyone around you
• You're a critical thinker who sees the system as a whole, and finds ways to cut to the core of the issue.
• You love creating fun, educational experiences that help people think differently
• You think about systems, not just details - you consider how data flows, how to handle API errors, and how to make the next iteration easier to develop than the previous. Furthermore, you consider the ways that other developers might interact with your code and anticipate gotchas. After shipping a product, you think about how to monitor its performance and improve it further based on feedback
• You know that sometimes "more tech" isn't the answer. You love thinking about people, processes, and systems for continuous improvement, and use a balance of technology and people skills to have a huge impact
• You seek to understand your teammates rather than win today's argument. You win hearts and minds with carefully considered opinions, and know that success comes from having a whole team working together well. You raise up your peers' voices and enjoy nothing more than seeing your teammates succeed
• You have a strong desire to improve things around you rather than just getting the job done. That said, you know that value exists only once it's shipped and are pragmatic about delivering results
• There will never be enough time to do everything. You think about the value of competing projects and priorities, and enjoy finding the balance between things that are urgent today, and things that will set us up for success in the longer term
• You're confident working independently with the tools you know, but appreciate opportunities to learn, know when to reach out for help, and love to help others
• It doesn't matter if you're missing experience with our tech stack as long as you can show a track record of picking things up quickly

You'll have autonomy, authority, and accountability to agreed outcomes, using the resources and team at your disposal.

We know a person's immediate boss has a massive impact on their work experience, so we're looking for someone dedicated to building and maintaining a great team. We have a strong focus on management practice, using one-on-ones, feedback, coaching and delegation to elevate the performance and accelerate the growth of team members. We suspect it's at least a small part of why our average tenure is around 5 years. You'll have opportunities to learn and practice using these techniques and others as part of our ongoing leadership training program. Pre-existing management experience isn't required — this is a great opportunity to step up into a management position with tons of support — but a strong desire to be a great leader is essential.

We're a together-first company. There is so much benefit to in-person collaboration when you're trying to build Cool New Stuff. Practically, this means we like our teams in the office at least once a week, and preferably more. As a leader, we'd really like you in the office 3 days per week on average (though we don't mind people working remotely for short stints) so that you're available to your and other teams. Beyond this, we're flexible - work from wherever suits you.

Your team will have a dedicated team office within our newly renovated CBD headquarters that you can set up as you wish, so you won't need to hotdesk, and you'll always have a meeting room available.

Part of leadership at Stile is our periodic in-person leadership offsites, where, we dive deep into different aspects of people management and learn from each other's experience. You have our commitment that they won't be a waste of your time.

We'll proactively discuss remuneration when we first chat. Broadly, this position will start at our Senior || Engineer level and scale upwards based on your experience. Our engineering salaries are benchmarked against major tech industry players every six months.

Sound interesting?

Great We want to know more about you, so read the details below then click apply and ensure you provide that cover letter to show you're great at following the details.

• A cover letter addressed to Daniel Rodgers-Pryor (no more than a page) explaining why you're going to smash this role out of the park.
  Include a paragraph on which Behaviours of an Effective Stile-ist most resonate with you or which you disagree with and why.
• Your resume

Got questions about our hiring process? You can find the answers here. We can't wait to hear from you