About PlayVS:
The fastest-growing high school sport and Collegiate in America isn’t basketball or football—it’s esports—and PlayVS is the official platform for High School and Collegiate esports. We offer an incredible, full-stack esport platform—game integrations, team building tools, leagues, tournaments, and schedules—and our software products tie everything together into a cohesive experience.
Director of Engineering
Responsible for the development of our engineering processes, the growth of its employees, and the culture of our feature teams at PlayVS. This position requires strong alignment with product, design, and operational stakeholders in order to deliver new features in the ever-changing esports industry. This person is expected to represent the engineering team to the rest of the company and embody our values around quality and personal excellence, both internally and for our customers. They will be managing engineering managers on our feature teams and will collaborate closely with the platform engineering team.
Skills to be successful:
- Strong planner and process-oriented while also maintaining flexibility and ability to adapt planning in a high-velocity environment
- Enthusiastic and motivated to drive projects to completion while ensuring buy-in from the broader engineering team.
- High tolerance to ambiguity. Has the ability to communicate and align with other stakeholders to make progress in the face of uncertainty
- Must be able to understand the implications of product decisions and their impact on our codebase and development process
- Strong understanding of project management, using agile methodologies and development work delivered in sprints
- Vocal and empathetic leader who can drive and nurture collaboration and teamwork, both in person and in a remote setting
Preferred Skills:
- Strong understanding of development in Javascript and/or Typescript, GraphQL, and SQL databases
- Experience working with and integrating third party API’s
- Knowledge of the gaming and/or esports industry
- Experience with larger teams and high-volume applications
Responsibilities:
People Leadership:
- Foster growth and development of engineers and managers during 1:1 meetings by providing clear and actionable feedback in addition to other supportive measures
- Drive us towards our mission by aligning managers around team and company objectives by providing a framework for feedback and improvement towards those goals
- Lead with empathy, listen well, and encourage positive relationships amongst the engineering team
- Align closely with recruiting on the interview process and candidate assessment across the product and engineering orgs
- Promote our core values through actions and celebrating members who embody them
Process Management:
- Refine our development lifecycle by promoting good planning and alignment across product, design, engineering, and QA
- Identify resource needs, key talent gaps, and areas of potential attrition across each team
- Define technical strategy for the engineering team through good documentation practices, strong communication, and technical planning
- Identify ways to improve new developer onboarding
- Champion cross-team collaboration through code reviews, RFCs, and frequent releases
Product Management:
- Work with product to determine resourcing for the roadmap and advocate for technical initiatives that improve engineering’s ability to deliver on the long-term vision
- Focus the engineering team on quality outcomes by emphasizing strong testing practices, QA alignment, and user feedback with the product team.
- Provide feedback and get alignment with the design team around their process with engineers and our visions for our design system.
- Help the engineering team show their best work to the company through demos, lunch and learns, and company events
