Director of EngineeringCervest

London Remote 13-05-2023
ClimateTech
B Corp

Cervest is building the world's first open access AI-powered Climate Intelligence platform.

We’re a Certified B Corporation with a vision to build a climate intelligent world — one where everyone is able to use Climate Intelligence to adapt with climate change. By making Climate Intelligence open, democratised and transparent we will power a global Climate Intelligent Network™ that drives a chain reaction of climate intelligent decisions to protect the world’s critical assets, including our greatest asset — the planet.

Using our pioneering EarthScanTM product, anyone can discover how current and future climate events such as flooding, droughts, and extreme temperatures will impact their assets. EarthScan helps our customers confidently de-risk decisions, meet financial disclosure needs and improve the resilience of the assets they own, manage or rely on.

As a company, we are a pro-diversity, highly inclusive organization, committed to bringing together people of all backgrounds and enabling them to succeed. We know that a richly diverse team will help us achieve our mission sooner.

Why will you enjoy this opportunity?

Cervest is building the world's first open access AI-powered Climate Intelligence platform. We are at an exciting moment in the company with our first product EarthScan™ already having a positive impact for our customers and we’re looking to expand our products and services both horizontally and vertically. This role is an opportunity to play a key part in growing our organisation, teams and platforms.

 

What are the expectations over the first 6-12 months you will work toward completing?

We are at a fluid stage as a business. There are two main areas of focus for this role. One is to directly manage the EarthScan Crew from a technical perspective. This includes collaborating with your Product and Design counterparts to set the direction for the Crew and help ensure its delivery. It also includes people management. The EarthScan Crew is currently made up of two teams. In the short to medium term, you will directly manage one team of engineers. The other team has its own engineering manager who in turn will report into you as well.

The second main area of focus is to help evolve the organisation for the next stage of growth - growth of our customer base, the load on our systems, the features available in our products, the size of our engineering organisation, etc. This evolution will require evolving the people, projects and processes within the Crew. As the organisation grows, this role eventually will solely manage engineering managers and perhaps one or two staff+ engineers who work across the whole Crew. We are looking for someone who can take an active role in helping us transition into this future state.

This role will not be expected to be writing code as a software engineer delivering critical path user stories. We do expect this role to be involved in pair programming, code reviews and architectural design in order to support learning & development of individuals, supporting the ways of working of the teams, and as part of being accountable for technical delivery.

 

What type of work will you be doing on a regular basis?

People - you’ll be accountable for the hiring in your teams, onboarding and training great engineers and engineering managers. You’ll be involved in career development, pay, promotion and performance reviews.

Processes - you’ll help the teams learn, adapt and improve upon agile, lean and product-led growth methodologies. You’ll help the teams understand and maintain a balance between speed of delivery and quality of product. You’ll be responsible for the teams’ on-call process and rota, and be a point of escalation for incidents. You will also be responsible for both Team and Crew-level processes.

Projects - you’ll be a key part of identifying, measuring and constantly improving the successful behaviour of our users as they discover, analyse and act on the climate risks and opportunities facing their assets. This is part of Cervest’s mission to empower our users to adapt with climate change and build a resilient future for our planet.


What does your tech stack look like?

We use a wide range of technologies from React & TypeScript on the frontend, to Python & Docker on the backend, to Terraform & Helm managing our AWS infrastructure just to name a few. This is by no means an exhaustive list. We also use tools like GitHub, Shortcut and Figma to help us deliver our work.


What is the structure and culture of the team like?


Each product-engineering team at Cervest typically will have 4-8 Engineers, an Engineering manager, a Product Manager, and support from other roles depending on the domain of the team (e.g. Designers, Architects, etc.).

You will be responsible for the EarthScan Crew, from an engineering perspective. The Crew is made up of two teams. You will directly manage one team and the engineering manager of the other will report in to you as well. In turn, you will report into the VP of Engineering for this part of the Build Group (what we call the organisational unit that comprises all of engineering, product, design, science, etc.).

We are a distributed, remote-first organisation. Our employees are predominantly from the UK, but we have colleagues from around Europe and a few in North America as well. A level of proficiency in the English language is a must, but we always take the opportunity to have conversations in any of the many languages we speak.

We have a strong culture of collaboration, empowerment, science, and inclusion. We don’t have a culture of micro-management. You will instead see one of support, coaching, facilitation and deep care.

 

Benefits:
As a rapidly scaling company on a mission, we are committed to ensuring that we support our team in developing in line with their aspirations and talents as well as continuing to develop our culture in line with our values.

We are a remote-first company and are hiring into the UK for this role. We are looking for a candidate who is comfortable working in a remote setting and with a diverse team distributed across multiple time zones. This job requires minimum travel for occasional regional or global team retreats only, using more sustainable transport methods (we’ll help with that).

 

  • 25 days’ holiday a year (plus 8 UK public holidays or local equivalent)
  • The company closes between December 24th and January 1st, which typically gives an extra 3 days off each year (on top of your 25 days entitlement)
  • Remote first company culture with flexible working hours
  • Maternity, paternity, adoption or shared parental leave policies
  • Every employee is given a plant of their choice
  • £1000 a year learning budget towards personal and professional development
  • £500 stipend to spend on your work from home setup (we’ll cover your laptop and peripherals such as a screen and keyboard - you will be able to choose between a Mac or PC)
  • Paid sick leave for physical and mental health with access to Spill
  • Virtual team and company activities such as pastry-making classes, mindfulness classes, coffee masterclasses and murder mysteries
  • £1500 loan towards a bike through the Cycle to Work Scheme (available for UK employees)
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Applications are now closed