VP of Engineering

..nd landlords. HousingAnywhere is active in 50 countries and 250+ cities. We have partnered with 150+ universities worldwide and currently target the international student market. We plan to expand to other audiences as well.

As a VP of Engineering, your goal will be to provide the technology required to deliver on our vision. We create the technology layer between tenants and landlords at different parts of their lifecycle, and enable them to efficiently take care of some of the crucial parts of their partnership. Today, we operate a marketplace that enables tenants to book a place comfortably without ever having viewed the room. While doing so, we developed an international payments platform that we will soon leverage to process all related rental payments between tenants and their landlords, very much like you see today already in P2P payment apps. At the same time, we see a great need for other applications (e.g. tenancy contracting, repair requests) that we can deliver on top of our P2P messaging experience. 

Our goal is to provide prospective tenants with a formidable experience when looking for a place to live. At the same time, we provide a platform to advertisers who are offering their room for rent. When we have demand and supply in our cities, we aim to provide high-quality matching and drive trust between the marketplace participants. We think about these challenges every day, and we would like to invite you to think along on how to best build a world-class product that powers the value that we create.

On the client-side we use React.js, Redux, GraphQL. Our back-end is powered by Go (Golang) and backed by a Postgres database. We run several microservices on Kubernetes. Each service is responsible for key components in our architecture. We've been using React, GraphQL and Golang in production environments since the early days and this reflects how much we love (new) technologies. Some other tools and technologies we use go unmentioned here, but feel free to ping us about this.

We're growing our Product Development team to 30 people (front-end engineers, back-end engineers, QA engineers, UX/UI designers and product owners). To help us build this team, we are looking for experienced Vice President of Engineering who has proven work experience in leading and motivating engineering teams, guaranteeing a process that helps achieve results and keeping the team as a whole in the right direction. We currently have 4 agile teams in place that work on different parts of our platform.
 

Your role:

• Build a high-performing engineering environment where top performers are encouraged to take decisions and workflows are designed to let them work in the most productive ways. Bottom performers, if there are any, will receive strong improvement plans;
• Partner with other teams to advise on how technology can help them deliver on their goals; 
• Review and then continuously improve our development practices across the business;
• Introduce tools, systems and processes to improve our code quality and standards;
• Improve our testing and deployment processes;
• Foster best-practices on QA process within the teams
• Identify skill gaps and strengths and facilitate training and skill sharing;
• Train, guide, and hire technology leaders (both technical and managerial) across the team;
• Collaborate closely with colleagues in Product, Design and Marketing to find opportunities for technology to improve quality, pace and innovation;
• Be the leading voice for technology during Roadmap discussions with the Product Owners and other department heads;

Delivery Process Improvement:

• Support our product owners, tech leads and others in improving the pace and quality of delivery of features and technical improvements;
• Mentoring and coaching of future tech leads;
• Supporting measurement and continuous improvement in delivery;
• Establish key metrics for the team’s accountability;

Skills and training:

• Develop our internal technology skills development programme across the whole business;
• Develop our engineering ladder and internal mentoring and career development processes;
• Find opportunities for our engineering team to publish and speak at industry events;
• Identify areas for company and individual skills improvements;

Hiring & building the engineering organization:

• Own the hiring pipeline for engineering roles in collaboration with our HR department;
• Headhunt top talent and replace below-par performers with new talent;
• Build the engineering employer brand;
• Advocate for HousingAnywhere across the industry;
• Roadmapping and guiding architecture development
• Review and then own the engineering roadmap;
• Make sure our agile teams are aligned on our engineering roadmap and deliver solutions that are within its scope;Improve documentation and maintenance of our systems;
• Review and manage 3rd party technology suppliers;

Sounds challenging? Become part of building HousingAnywhere!

REQUIREMENTS

Characteristics we are looking for in our team members:

• Proactive and open mindset
• Structured and well-organised
• Team player
• Pragmatic
• Interest in new technologies

Experience needed:

• Have led at least one larger engineering team or chapter and has been part of a wider executive team within a business;
• Know how to manage - motivate, inspire, and mentor engineers;
• Know how to communicate your vision on technology and the details of implementation to non-technical team colleagues at all levels
• Background in software engineering is desirable

BENEFITS

Perks

• You will work in an international start-up company, with a young, dynamic team of 80 full time people and nearly 30 different nationalities.
• High responsibility; changes to the platform are visible to a global audience of 5+ million visitors per year. In 2018 we expect to process more than EUR 50 million in rental payments.

Practicalities

• Full-time position (40 hours a week).
• Starting: ASAP.
• Probationary period: 1 month.
• Period: we would like to start with a period of 7 months.
• You will work from our office in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Our offer

• Market competitive salary plus stock option plan;
• Professional development allowance;
• Company provided laptop and equipment;
• Be at the core of a scaling company and impactful product;
• Relocation package (if applicable);