Technical Lead

About OpenSesame

OpenSesame's mission is to help develop the world's most productive and admired workforces. We do this by delivering a comprehensive catalog of eLearning courses from the world's top publishers. We add value to customers through their entire learning journey.

While it appears to most people that we sell training courses (over 40,000 of them), what we really offer is the opportunity for companies to upgrade the skills of each of their employees.

We are at a pivotal time in our growth as we diversify how we drive revenue. We've expanded our product offering dramatically and have a growing network of partners that is developing into a vibrant channel. Our customer base has high satisfaction ratings and there is room to grow our retention even more.

www.opensesame.com/about.

About the Job

We are seeking a Technical Lead with experience in Extreme Programming (XP) practices—such as test-driven development, continuous deployment, and evolutionary design—who will improve skills and create a bridge between engineers in a global set of teams. The ideal candidate will work with people in India, Latin America, the UK, and the US, who lead by example to teach and mentor the engineers they work with. They will come up to speed quickly in Node/React and PHP codebases, identify challenges, and coach teams in addressing them.

“Help engineering teams achieve greatness.”

Performance Objectives:

In your first 90 days, you will be ramping up and working to understand the needs and opportunities of the engineers on your team. You will develop a plan in collaboration with management and begin executing that plan.

People:

• Form rapport with team members (including Product and Design) and engineering leaders.
• Understand your team’s process and how people work together.
• Understand engineers’ needs and frustrations.
• Pair and mob with team members to develop their skills as part of their normal work.
• Advise engineering managers on how to take advantage of team members’ strengths and how to address their weaknesses.

Product:

• Understand how to use your team’s products.
• Understand how your team’s work fits into the big picture.
• Understand your team’s code, design, architecture, and tech stack.
• Mentor team members in collectively owning their work.
• Mentor team members in working incrementally.

Process:

• Collaborate with senior team members on test-driven development, pairing, and teaming/mobbing.
• Mentor team members in improving build processes to achieve zero-friction local development and continuous integration.
• Mentor team members in creating fast, reliable tests based on James Shore’s “Testing Without Mocks” pattern language.
• Mentor team members in incrementally refactoring their code.

Within 6 months, you will have established yourself as a trusted expert on your team. You will have made connections with engineers across the organization.

People:

• Directly provide support, guidance and mentoring to every member of your team
• Collaborate with engineering managers to develop team members’ career opportunities.
• Form relationships with engineers across the organization.

Product:

• Lead the combination of engineering teams working on the integration of related products 
• Develop team members’ ability to collectively own their work without your active involvement.
• Develop team members’ ability to work incrementally without your active involvement.

Process:

• Develop team members’ ability to apply XP practices such as TDD, continuous integration, and refactoring without your active involvement.
• Develop team members’ ability to continuously improve their build and integration processes without your active involvement.
• Mentor team members in applying evolutionary design.
• Work with engineering leaders to identify and begin applying solutions to large-scale design challenges.

By the end of your first year, you will have established yourself as a trusted expert across the organization. 

• Serve as a subject matter expert on key company platforms
• Lead features from technical discovery to delivery including design, development, test automation (unit and integration), deployment automation, load testing, and implementing production monitoring.
• Support the Engineering Manager by ensuring the best practices and s