The Role
The VP Engineering reports directly to the CEO and is a member of the Senior Executive team. The position is based in London, but with longer-term flexibility for placement in the United States (East Coast) for the right candidate. Although travel will be required during our entry into target cities, we do not anticipate this being a substantial part of the role.
Key Responsibilities:
1. Own the design and delivery of all Hailo’s technology and systems including:
a. Apps – driver and passenger
b. Infrastructure – backend systems including real-time communications, optimisation, transactions / payment, and service recovery
c. R+D – data, algorithms, next-generation interfaces
d. Internal tools - insight, accounting, reconciliation, communications
e. Marketing and CRM / Support – driver and customer recruitment and retention tools (incl. Web & Salesforce)
2. Lead the Development Team
a. Put your hard-earned gravitas to work to get the most out of our development team – help them push themselves to achieve beyond what they ever dreamed possible
b. Catalyse a culture of innovation, outside-the-box thinking, and technical and research-oriented solutions to hard operational problems
c. Create an environment that attracts intelligent, curious, and creative engineers across varied disciplines
d. Ensure technology always leads the organisation and pushes it forward, rather than becoming a bottleneck which holds back ideas and progress
e. Develop and maintain the product roadmap, working closely with the VP of Product and senior executive team
f. Instil best practice, particularly around continuous integration, sensible agile development, and issue tracking (we use JIRA Studio)
g. Contribute to and shape the product through your own ideas and those fed through the product management process
h. Ensuring a forever current and flexible platform to meet the rapidly changing needs of the business, and to service the new ideas which just might be the foundation for future growth
3. Build a Scalable and Robust, Global Infrastructure and Organisation
a. Grow a base team in London, build a potential second location in NYC, made up of only the best.
b. Ensure Hailo’s infrastructure is robust and scalable (working with our Head of IT Operations), both as a means of connecting internal teams and servicing external drivers and customers.
Requirements:
• Relevant degree / masters from a leading university
• 3-5 years experience leading development and QA teams providing large scale Internet services
• Intense exposure or experience in mobile
• Demonstrable experience building applications and infrastructures for a global audience
• A programming / engineering background and still a coder at heart
• Experience working in a startup or early stage business, preferably as a founder
• Proven experience managing a team of 20+
• Thrives in fast-paced, always-changing, unstructured environments
• Knack for creating order in chaos
• Fun-loving, high-energy, driven, possibly with an offbeat demeanour