About the Role
If we are successful, you will lead the engineering team to build the public internet for the world’s non-public information — unlocking 1,000,000x more data in every scientific field and industry, and ensuring it is offered to the world as a part of an open, public information network. If the world avoids entrapping its private data in a walled garden, it will avoid this failure because you led an ambitious engineering team to open and de-silo the world’s information. And on the heels of 1,000,000x more data hitting every scientific field and industry, a world-wide innovation boom will owe a debt of gratitude to you, and to the people you led through a challenging technological transition.
Responsibilities
- Growing our engineering team from 10 to 15-20 within the next year
- Fostering the culture of the engineering team (special challenges: fully remote, distributed, non-profit, open-source, ambitious, mission-driven organization which is pre-product market fit… 1000 ways to not make a lightbulb type culture)
- Mentoring tech leads
- Working with the engineering team to cultivate an engineering vision and strategy which can deliver on the Chief Product Officer’s product roadmap and OpenMined’s overall mission (special challenges: tech transfer, integration science, cross-disciplinary across distributed systems, cryptography, and deep learning; pre-product market fit, many rapid pivots while also gaining progress over time — constantly calibrating software stability and speed of innovation)
- Final signoff on timeline estimates for features and for cultivating a team which can meet timelines (and manage expectations when timelines need adjusting)
- Ensure that each member of the engineering team is aligned to the engineering strategy — and to OpenMined’s mission overall (special challenges: our vision doesn’t have widely recognized buzz words, we’re still discovering how to describe different facets, balancing short-term vision with long-term vision focus, translating across technical and non-technical stakeholders, translating for both internal and external audiences)
- Own the long term robustness and security of the software built by OpenMined
- Manage the tradeoff between the forward advancement of the codebase and the accumulation of technical debt along the way.
- Managing uncertainty and people experiencing uncertainty (special challenges: tech transfer, pre-product-market fit, ambitious goal, many pivots)
- Collaborating with the leadership team (fellow department leads and the executive director) to create the organization’s strategic plan, including long-term, annual, and quarterly goals
- At the end of the day, you are responsible for the quality of the codebase which gets delivered to users — as a function of the culture, tradeoffs, and architecture you steward. This will probably be hard to do if you don’t write some code — but also it’s a management role
