VP, Engineering

Join Affinity as we redefine how professionals manage and leverage their networks, transforming relationships into meaningful opportunities. You'll be part of a team focused on improving our core product and platform, making relationship intelligence indispensable through advanced data analytics. With our growing user base and expansion into new markets, we're more committed than ever to delivering relationship intelligence to professionals everywhere.

Your role and impact:

As the VP of Engineering at Affinity, you will report to the CTO and lead the development of our innovative CRM product and platform. Your strategic vision will ensure we build strong foundations that drive outstanding customer outcomes and promote cross-functional collaboration. Implementing the Product Operating Model is a top priority for our R&D team, and your leadership will be vital in facilitating and championing this change. You'll also direct our technical and architectural roadmap, ensuring peak performance and user experience through our suite of applications.

Key responsibilities:

• Shape Product Roadmap: Collaborate with product and design leaders to establish a compelling future vision for our product, crafting a strategic roadmap that seamlessly integrates product, design, and engineering.
• Lead Engineering Execution: Lead engineering execution, ensuring quality software and a delightful user experience through continuous, iterative development practices, while driving initiatives to refine our overall development approach and delivery processes.
• Grow and Scale the Team: Shape the team's composition, specify hiring needs, and source and onboard engineers whose diverse technical abilities and soft skills contribute to well-rounded, cohesive teams.
• Develop Teams: Guide and develop a high-performing team through leadership, coaching, and mentoring, fostering a culture of excellence and continuous improvement while ensuring inclusive development opportunities for all team members.
• Craft Technical Strategy: Develop a technical strategy and roadmap aligned with Affinity’s business and product needs, focusing on delivering high quality, great usability, fast performance across applications and APIs.
• Manage Technical Debt: Lead company-wide prioritization of improvements to code quality, systems, and the engineering processes to support these.
• Drive Strategic Decisions: Navigate complex discussions and drive decisions aligned with business context, product, architecture, design philosophies, and strategies.
• Develop and Manage Department KPIs: Establish and monitor key performance indicators to ensure department goals are met.

Qualifications

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every qualification. At Affinity, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t perfectly align with the qualifications above, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Required:

• 13+ years of experience building scalable web applications with large volumes of data and rich visualizations.
• 8+ years in an engineering leadership role, at least at one point overseeing organizations of 60 or more, with experience in managing multiple teams through managers and team leads (growing managers of managers, ideally directors).
• Experience developing, coaching and managing engineering leaders, such as Engineering Directors, Engineering Managers and Staff Engineers.
• Care personally about the people you work with, and about helping them to grow and develop in their careers, while also challenging them when necessary.
• Experience recruiting and closing engineering candidates.
• Passion for designing, evolving, and optimizing the development process, ideally leveraging practices such as Kanban to help developers maintain a seamless workflow.
• Balance thoughtfully between short-term business priorities and long-term investment and strategy.
• Take pride in delivering an exceptionally high-quality product, ensuring outstanding functionality, while maintaining the platform’s overall performance and reliability.
• You're excited to work collaboratively within engineering and across functional teams.
• Articulate, confident, and persuasive communication skills, coupled with the ability to listen and prioritize diverse perspectives.

Nice to have:

• Experience leading in organizations that leverage the Product Operating Model.
• Experience working with Ruby, React, or PostgreSQL.
• Experience working with CRM-type applications that deal with problems like entity resolution and designing data models to store lots of attributes across many entities.
• Experience building data-intensive applications.

Tech stack

Our platform is built with React and TypeScript on the front end, and with Ruby and PostgreSQL on the back end. Our infrastructure is hosted by AWS and runs on Kubernetes. 

What you’ll enjoy at Affinity:

• We live our values as playmakers, obsessed with learning, care personally about our colleagues and clients, are radically open-minded, and take pride in everything we do.
• Health Care coverage and flexible personal & sick days. We want our team to be happy and healthy :)
• We provide an annual budget for you to spend on education and offer a comprehensive L&D program – after all, one of our core values is that we’re #obsessedwithlearning! 
• We support our employee’s overall health and well-being and reimburse monthly for things such as; Transportation, Home Internet, Meals, and Wellness memberships/equipment.
• Virtual team building and socials. Keeping people connected is essential.

Please note that the role compensation details below reflect the base salary only and do not include any equity or benefits. This represents the salary range that Affinity believes, in good faith, at the time of this posting, that it will pay for the posted job.  

A reasonable estimate of the current range is $245,000 to $300,000 CAD. Within the range, individual pay depends on various factors including geographical location and review of experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant. 

Last updated on Aug 7, 2024