Upwave

Manager, Engineering

Upwave is the Brand Intelligence Platform. We make brand marketing more impactful.

Our customers are Fortune 500 companies across multiple verticals - including CPG, food & beverage, consumer technology & telecom, and financial services - as well as the world’s largest advertising agencies and media platforms.

We are unapologetically supportive of brand advertising, and work hard every day to prove its value; we know if companies can measure the value of their advertising dollars, they’ll spend more. Brand advertising pays for not only the TV we watch and music we hear, but the journalism we read and the information we access. In short, brand advertising supports the free flow of information through society. So, we’re proud to be the first company dedicated to using data science to show enterprises the true effectiveness of their brand spending.

We are backed by leading venture investors (Y Combinator, Uncork Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Initialized Capital, PivotNorth, Ridge Ventures, Industry Ventures, Conductive Ventures) and leading MarTech founders & CEOs.

Upwave has already built the industry’s leading toolkit for gathering, analyzing, and exploring data on consumer brand perception. Our tools are used daily by managers and marketers at many of the world’s best known brands (like Nestlé and American Express) and Upwave is now ready to step on the gas and scale up until we become the de facto industry standard. That means constantly working to deeply understand our users' needs and to scale our existing platform while still constantly building new, powerful, low-friction, self-serve analytical tools that directly help marketers allocate hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing budget.

Our engineering team has a mission of consistently delivering high-quality, high-velocity, sustainable software development. Our managers are responsible for ensuring we provide the right systems, structure, and support to accomplish that mission.

As A Manager, You Will:

• Manage 1-2 cross-functional teams of engineers, with experience levels ranging from early-career to decades-in.
• Work with Upwave’s product and engineering leadership to shape and refine our vision of developing the world’s leading brand intelligence platform.
• Turn the vision into a reality by working with your paired product manager(s) to define your teams' roadmap and then driving that roadmap’s execution.
• Set a high technical standard, and guide your team to consistently achieve a high level of technical excellence through coaching, mentoring, training, and reviewing design documents and high-impact pull requests. (But not by doing the work yourself – you will not be expected to code on a day-to-day basis).
• Inspire and grow your team through thoughtful career planning and coaching.
• Give your team challenges to which they’re excited to rise.
• Provide mentorship, sponsorship, empowerment, feedback, clear expectations, and recognition of a job well done.
• Help the team do its best work by managing and continuously improving our software development lifecycle and other team processes.
• Have the autonomy to lead, build and grow your team. Have the support you need to recruit, develop, and retain a team of great engineers who complement each other as a diverse, inclusive, effective team.
• Act as a cultural steward, and set a consistently positive example of healthy, effective, inclusive Upwaver behavior.

About you:

• You’ve lead (and ideally managed) teams that have designed and shipped high-impact, high-value SaaS and/or enterprise software. We care more about what you’ve accomplished than years of management experience, but you will need a track record of being the person your teammates turn to for guidance when the going gets tough.
• You’re curious, and you believe there is no substitute for understanding. You don’t trust a system until you can predict its behavior, and you put in the work to build your big picture understanding on top of a mastery of the details. You never stop learning and working to improve your craft.
• You are a systems thinker. You know that changes have unintended consequences, and that human systems are volatile, messy, and sensitive. You don’t overestimate your control, but you remain optimistic about your ability to improve the systems you touch.
• You’re humble. You understand that your role is to do whatever's needed to make your team successful, not to tell people what to do. You understand that you’ll be responsible for making sure we end up with great systems, great teams, and great products by making sure the best ideas emerge, even if those ideas aren’t yours.
• You’re comfortable being accountable for the technical quality of your team’s output. You know how to work with a team to raise the technical bar, even in areas where you’re not a domain expert. You lift up your team rather than “doing it yourself”, but you still have sound enough technical judgement to referee when you need to.
• You believe in and value rigorous engineering methodology. You believe that well-structured code, comprehensive testing, and solid engineering methodology are a must. You know how to teach those values (and the requisite skills) to new engineers.
• You’re organized. Our engineering managers shepherd our software development lifecycle, and you’ll need to both set a good example and sweat the details.
• You are an excellent communicator. You know that what matters is what they heard, not what you said. So you figure out and do what’s necessary to connect with each person as an individual. You understand that alignment requires constant maintenance and investment, and you put in the work to align stakeholders and your team. You practice compassionate, empathetic, effective, and non-violent communication.
• You take inclusivity and safety seriously. You genuinely care about people and your team, and you build a welcoming work environment where everyone has the space and safety to bring their best selves to work.

Bonus points:

• Experience managing teams that have built data-intensive, cloud-native enterprise applications, done web development with JVM-based backend languages (particularly Java or Groovy or Kotlin) and React front-ends.
• Experience at a startup or fast-growing company.
• Experience with Scrum.
• Experience with marketing technology, advertising technology, or market research companies.

Why You’ll Like Working Here:

• Upwave is an engineering-first company. We believe high velocity comes from high efficiency, not high effort. And we believe that the development we do must be sustainable for the entire team. We set priorities rather than deadlines, we don’t crunch, we work reasonable hours, and engineers and managers actually take vacations.
• Upwavers treat each other well. We screen for people who are unusually caring, and who want to collaborate and know how to do it effectively and compassionately.
• Upwave is actually disrupting (in the Clayton Christensen sense) a major industry by offering functionality that our users can’t find anywhere else, at a technology-enabled price point that our services-oriented competitors structurally can’t match. The media industry is going through major tectonic shifts, and at Upwave you’ll both observe and influence the media industry’s reinvention.
• You’ll work with teams using modern technologies (e.g. React, Kubernetes, AWS) to solve cutting edge problems. Upwave is not just another software-as-a-service tool; we’re an intuitive user-interface on top of a deep and complex business workflow that requires:
  • collecting hundreds of billions of advertising events, using them intelligently to collect consumer sentiment data, applying recently published (and in some cases, internally invented) causal inference and machine learning techniques to derive statistically valid conclusions, presenting those conclusions to end users in a way that empowers them to make genuinely better business decisions.
• We’re “post product market fit”, meaning that we’re far enough along in our journey to know that we’re building something real users find valuable enough to pay (handsomely) for. But we’re playing in a huge market, and we’re early enough along that each individual engineer and engineering leader can still have a pivotal impact on our product and on the overall trajectory and success of our business.
• We’re a remote-first team, with members spanning half the globe (but only one half, to ensure everyone can talk live when we need to). You’ll work with extremely talented engineers from different states, countries, and cultures, and you’ll get to learn about their diverse backgrounds and fascinating day-to-day experiences and life stories.
• We offer highly competitive compensation, benefits, and employee equity.

Upwave is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.