Director of Engineering

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about 2 years old

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About Flexport: 

We believe trade can move the human race forward. That’s why it’s our mission to make global trade easy for everyone. Flexport is building the platform for global logistics, empowering buyers, sellers and their logistics partners with the technology and services to grow and innovate. Today, companies of all sizes—from emerging brands to Fortune 500s—use Flexport technology to move more than $10B of merchandise across 112 countries every year.

The opportunity:

This position consist of two duties:

  1. Directly manage 3 Asia Shipper (exporter) domain engineering teams (2 in Shenzhen, 1 in Shanghai).
  2. Act as the site leader for all tech teams in Shenzhen (5 teams). 

Shipper:

Our shipper experience team focuses on flexport's collaboration with shippers and their overall experiences. This includes: collecting information from shippers (such as booking and shipper docs), tailoring the experience of client applications to be targeted towards shippers, fostering growth from shipper sectors, and localizing the experience to shippers and workflows around the world. At the moment there is a heavy emphasis on Asia shippers, but we hope to build the foundations that would empower shippers around the world. 

 

Site Lead:

We currently have 5 engineering teams in Shenzhen. In addition to shipper teams, there are teams in two other domains: operations tooling and platform. A site lead will NOT directly manage the other teams' people or roadmap. However, a site lead would represent our local teams in front of internal tech leaders, business leadership, influence internal policies from Asia perspective and internal functions. Foster a good site-level culture and collaboration. Flexport Asia technology is in the stage of rapid expansion, and you will be ultimately responsible for the face-paced growth of the site while maintaining culture.

 

You will

  • As Shipper Director of Engineering:
    • Recruit and retain product engineering teams focused on the needs of Shippers Globally.
    • Be accountable for the delivery of the Shipper teams in Asia, making sure the team achieves short term and long term objectives. Execution driven and biased for action. 
    • Project/Program manage large and complex projects of diverse scope, and be ultimately responsible for its delivery and output.
    • Collaborate effectively with peers in Product Management, Design, and Business & Operations. 
    • Provide guidance to technical architecture design that is maintainable and practical.
    • Own the efficiency of the team, provide guidance to direct reports on continuous process improvements. 
    • Be responsible for planning strategic (long term) and tactical (short-medium term) initiatives that are aligned with company business objectives. Maintain a disciplined planning process for the organization.
    • Be a strategic thinker. Build an expert knowledge of the shipper product area and freight industry as a whole. Set strategic guidance for the team to deliver.
    • Demonstrates judgment on a daily basis when making decisions and communicating outwards.
    • Sets and owns success metrics, OKRs.  
    • Manage and mentor other junior managers and engineers on the Shipper team, provide guidance and career goal opportunities.
    • Connect with the team on a personal level. Identify morale issues within the team, and support team members to ensure the long term health of the team.
  • As Shenzhen Site Lead:
    • Maintain a healthy culture on the site. Build site-level camaraderie. Lead by example. Embodies and evangelizes a strong engineering culture. Be a culture carrier.
    • Be an advocate for the site, create visibility for the senior leadership, build strong relationships among other Tech and non-Tech leaders. 
    • Influence Flexport Technology policies and ensure there is a strong Asia influence or change them to meet local needs.
    • Lead office-centric recruiting efforts in partnership with the recruiting team, for example:
      • Create alignment across hiring managers and define clear prioritization.
      • Participate in recruiting key staffing positions
      • Refining local pitches and close strategies
      • Planning for fast growth balanced with culture fit
    • In planning and staffing, make trade-offs across teams in the best interest of the company, not just for your own shipper teams. 
    • Foster cross team collaborations/sharings. Keeping a pulse on internal mobility opportunities. 
    • Communicate with the team to cascade top-down messages as well as surfacing front-line messages and issues to the top. 
    • Lead local programs and events, such as cultural celebrations, teambuilding, hackathons, recruiting events, internal learning/sharings. 
    • Collaborate with People team develop regional talent strategies, including: compensation, mobility, talent hierarchy, growth and career development. 
    • Be point of contact for the site's tech function, and collaborate with other functions when needed (for example: business development, workplace, marketing, finance). 
    • Be flexible, there is a lot of "fill the gap" here. 

You should have

  • Bachelor’s or above degree in Computer Science or a technical field.
  • At least 10 years experience building software or web applications.
  • At least 5 years of management experience managing technical teams.  Experience in managing multiple teams with diverse scope. 
  • Strong technical and logical thinking foundation. Experience in complex technical system architecture. Has a strong individual developer background.
  • Track record of delivering on ambitious goals with high quality.
  • Ability to collaborate across many different functions.
  • Ability to jump outside of the technical domain and understand business strategies and impacts. 
  • Experience leading large initiatives with multiple stakeholders.
  • Strong English and Chinese communication skills. Has experience in an English working environment. 
  • Experience working in Global companies
  • Passion to help others and fill the gap when needed.
  • Motivated always learning and improving yourself and your team 
  • Can build and maintain a strong team culture. Lead by example. 
  • A “compliance first” attitude to keep our regulators happy and enthusiastic about Flexport since we operate in a heavily regulated industry.

Bonus points

  • A cultural carrier at a previous company.
  • Have led fast paced growth of your own team in the past (0-1 or 50-100). 
  • Experience in logistic industry or B2B SAAS applications
  • Experience in a service/microservice oriented architecture. Has experience migrating a monolithic application to services. 
  • Can wear many non-technical hats (for example, product, sales, operations) in previous technical positions.