Engineering Manager, Payments
About LeafLink
LeafLink is the regulated cannabis industry's largest wholesale marketplace, providing licensed dispensaries the ability to order from their favorite brands, as well as a suite of software tools for those brands to manage and scale their operations.
With thousands of retailers and thousands of brands across 26 territories in the US and Canada, we are setting the industry standard for how cannabis businesses grow together. LeafLink annually processes and manages more than $1 billion in wholesale cannabis orders - you can learn more about our history and path to $1B here http://firstbillion.leaflink.com/.
Our team, backed by funding from leading VC's, including Thrive Capital and Lerer Hippeau is poised to define the cannabis supply chain through technology. LeafLink was named one of Built In NYC's 'Best Places to Work in 2021', as well as one of Fast Company's 'Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Enterprise for 2018', joining the ranks of Amazon, Slack, and VMWare - and we're just getting started!.
The Role:
LeafLink is seeking an Engineering Manager to join our New York team who is passionate about building high-performing teams and products. Overseeing multiple cross-functional pods and products, this role will partner closely with our product teams to deliver features and new architecture to a growing platform of liquidity, payments, and financial services. This role will involve managing a team of talented engineers as well as have a hands-on, lasting impact on our platform architecture, new and existing service offerings, standards and processes within the department, and our company's growth and expansion roadmaps.
LeafLink has built a successful financial platform, helping brands and retailers on our platform optimize cash flow and reduce risk. We’ve built a growing team around these products and are now looking for an experienced Engineering leader to come in and take the team and software products to the next level. As an Engineering Manager working within various financial domains, your role has the opportunity to help shape and grow these products and the engineers that work on it. You will get to work with new and growing technologies and concepts such as containerized and serverless design patterns, Python, Node.js, Golang, Kubernetes, AWS managed services, third-party financial tooling integrations, and service-oriented architectures. It’s a very exciting time to join our engineering team!
Reporting to the Director of Engineering overseeing our Financial technology, this role will be responsible for managing a team of engineers, overseeing career growth and day-to-day operations for both them as well as multiple cross-functional product-focused pods. The role is flexible in terms of management vs hands-on development split, but candidates should expect to work in a wide variety of capacities within the department, ranging from providing technical leadership through overseeing architectural vision, implementation, and iteration, leading and mentoring by example through code reviews and direct feedback, and interacting with their direct reports to ensure career pathing remains on track and impediments to process are remediated quickly and sustainably.
Ideal candidates for this role possess the ability to organize, manage, and deliver complex projects not only from an engineering and architecture perspective but also by implementing and iterating on team processes that promote collaboration and general cohesiveness among team members. Additionally, candidates will be well placed if they enjoy finding, hiring, and growing strong technical talent and working to grow and foster a culture that’s both inclusive and values the diversity of its members. This role comes with the opportunity to be a high performer within a department that’s fast-paced, dynamic, and quickly growing in all areas.
The responsibilities described below are representative of those the person in this role would be performing, but should not be considered an exhaustive list - this position is extremely flexible in terms of its areas of focus!
Responsibilities:
- Mentor and manage a team of engineers, focusing on both their day-to-day responsibilities as members of the engineering department and also their career growth, interpersonal and leadership skills, and future-facing goals
- Develop short and long term strategic goals to continue to push LeafLink’s technology offerings forward
- Plan, lead, and deliver product and projects that focus on those efforts, partnering closely with product leaders and external stakeholders
- Establish clear goals and success criteria for the various projects being worked on so KPIs can be measured and reported accurately to determine project health
- Participate in and lead quarterly OKR planning and execution sessions with both your direct reports and your pod team members, working closely with department leadership to craft challenging-but-reachable goals for each
- Run regular engineering-focused meetings and events to ensure alignment and knowledge transfer both intra-department and externally to the rest of the company
- Interview and contribute to the growth of the engineering team, focusing on finding and then retaining candidates that will continue to elevate and diversify our ever-expanding set of in-house engineering talent
- Work closely with off / nearshore technical talent as they continue to help LeafLink deliver and iterate on our wide range of product offerings
- Set and drive process and architectural standards that reflect the unique complexities of LeafLink’s business model while also complementing existing and ongoing work within other areas of the department
- Keep up to date on modern technologies and trends and advocate for their inclusion within products when it makes sense
- Understand and utilize knowledge around the difficulties faced by LeafLink’s engineering team in order to make informed technology decisions and architectural approaches when implementing new functionality
- Oversee and contribute meaningfully to various projects and initiatives within the department, helping to mentor and grow the technical competencies of the team through code reviews and active development
- Partner effectively with other teams within the department that are responsible for supporting various applications and products today
- Help cultivate and advance a collaborative culture that values ownership and finding the best solution to a given problem while also emphasizing the importance of testing and automation
- Take a data-driven approach to product development and iteration, and help continue to advocate and assist other departments in doing the same
- Advocate for and deliver well-balanced solutions to technical issues as they arise based on a constantly-evolving product roadmap
- Analyze and evaluate existing solutions within the company and help drive decisions on whether to extend or refactor as needed
- Work closely with stakeholders to understand their needs and help craft solutions that move our various platforms forward
- Help coordinate and communicate project estimations to the rest of the management team as well as stakeholders
Qualifications:
- A strong leader with proven experience leading, growing, and mentoring teams of engineers
- A passion for building and retaining teams of individuals that are highly motivated and excited about the work they’re contributing to
- Experience working to expand and strengthen community outreach and other diversity-focused initiatives
- Experience working in and advocating for agile environments
- Experience managing product and project process, resourcing, timelines, and delivery efforts with cross-functional teams
- Extensive experience leading and contributing to high-functional, large scale architecture
- Experience working in service-oriented, API-driven application tech stacks and working knowledge of the challenges and gotchas that can bring to the SDLC
- Experience architecting, building, and delivering highly-performant APIs and supplemental applications
- Experience working with payments, lending, banking, pricing or other financial domain related systems as well as their mobile counterparts
- Experience working within environments that rely heavily on automation, CI, and CD concepts to rapidly deliver, measure, and iterate on products and features
- Experience within containerized, serverless, and event-driven infrastructure, Kubernetes, document databases, and AWS
- Exceptional written and oral communication skills
- Exceptional critical thinking and analytical skills, possessing the ability to quickly understand and ideate on complex systems and their associated data
- Passionate about product and customer-focused, data-driven decision-making and continuous iteration
- Experience communicating estimations and project visibility to senior management and stakeholders
- An active member of the open-source and New York tech community a plus
- An interest in the cannabis industry and/or the LeafLink brand
- An interest and deep understanding of financial services is a plus
Benefits:
- Flexible PTO to give our employees a little extra R&R when they need it
Competitive compensation and 401k
Comprehensive health coverage (medical, dental, vision)
Company sponsored Annual Citibike Membership for NYC employees
Commuter Benefits through a Flexible Spending Account
A robust stock option plan to give our employees a direct stake in LeafLink’s success
LeafLink’s employee-centric culture has earned us a coveted spot on BuiltInNYC’s Best Places to Work for in 2021 list. Learn more about LeafLink’s history and the path to our First Billion in Wholesale Cannabis Orders here.