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Engineering Manager | Platforms

Melbourne

If you love people, process + delivery in equal measure, then this one’s for you. The 99designs by Vista Delivery Systems team has an opportunity for an Engineering Manager to join them, making an impact & cultivating a team of smart and passionate engineers. Working in the platform space there’s complexity galore, with cutting edge tooling and tech to jump into. 

As a people first business, this is the dream environment for those that believe in leadership through service, example, empowerment, empathy, and inclusion… Did I say that this was a dream role already!?

99designs by Vista is the world’s global creative platform that makes it easy for clients and designers to work together to create designs they love. Since 2008, their freelance community has brought more than one million creative projects to life for thousands of genius entrepreneurs, savvy small business owners, and brands with big ideas. As part of the Vista family, which includes VistaPrint and VistaCreate, 99designs helps small businesses thrive with expert design at their fingertips.

Why join now? You’d be joining a high calibre and mature product tech business that’s small enough for you to have real impact. 

Working in the Platform group you’re at the very heart of 99designs by Vista mission – this is the group that builds the foundational products, software, infrastructure and tools that every team relies upon. Their ethos is all about empowering and enabling other 99ers to do their best work yet & to deliver ever faster customer value. 

Working in the Delivery Systems team it’s all about uncovering what slows engineers down, and creatively looking at what opportunities and tooling we have to improve upon that. It’s an exciting space because they don’t have it all figured out just yet – you’d be joining the team in the early days as a bit of an explorer, a pioneer, to solve some big and interesting challenges across the business. This team has both a big and diverse stakeholder group, so there’s a nice bit of complexity in the facilitation and influencing for a leader to jump into. 

There are two streams of work – delivery systems and frontend. The delivery systems stream is deep into all things AWS infrastructure, developer tooling, site reliability engineering, and security (to name but a few!) The frontend stream is currently taking on the challenge of moving their frontend monorepo into micro frontends, owns their design system, and has a focus on accessibility.    

The techy bits
The 99designs by Vista platform consists of a fleet of microservices written in Go with a GraphQL backend-for-frontend aggregation layer and a Typescript/Javascript React frontend. There’s also a bit of Ruby and PHP in there too.

99designs by Vista is an early AWS customer, and has been early adopters of Docker, ECS and most recently Fargate as the hosting platform of choice. Supporting the developers in their ability to ship multiple times a day is a large body of Docker based tooling, Buildkite for continuous deployment and DataDog for observability.

Every team is fullstack and looks after an end-to-end, vertical slice of the 99designs by Vista product. This means that you own part of the front-end, back-end, storage, and operations – the goal is for teams to be in control of delivering a great end-user experience. 

A little bit about you
We are looking for a technical leader in web development (we are open to any tech stack), who preferably has experience in fast growing startup environments with the following:

• Experience leading a team, major streams of work, or large, complex development projects.
• Strong business understanding and technical vision; you have ideas to empower your team & the rest of 99designs by Vista, as well as small businesses and creators (their users)
• Strong ability to influence and collaborate with people at all levels, with excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and deriving satisfaction from clarifying unknowns.
• You have actively coached and mentored team members in their careers.
• Bonus points: you are passionate and want to participate in coding pair-programming, and reviewing PRs.

If this sounds good – but you’re thinking this might be a big step-up for you: we want to hear from you too! 99designs by Vista can support you with professional training, workshops, and mentorship to help your transition into management become a success.

Why 99designs by Vista?
As 99designs continues to scale as part of the Vista family, they are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team that reflects the communities in which they operate. They want people to feel like they belong and can bring their whole selves to work. Their aim is to continue to foster a collaborative environment with a keen focus on innovation, growth and ownership. Below are just some of the things that they do to support their people:
  

• Career development and learning in whatever way suits you. Think: fortnightly paid R&D days, courses, formal and informal mentoring, conferences… however you learn best 99d has got you covered!
• Grow your technical chops. On the job training & development in emerging industry standards such as Go and GraphQL.
• Culture of workplace flexibility. Everyone has unique needs and lives and 99d  will support you in the best way that they can. Some people might work remotely, some with flex start and finish times… the common thread is it’s all about your individual needs. You’ll be set up at home with an Apple laptop, monitor, desk, chair, headphones etc. (the works), plus annually refreshing your WFH space with $300, to do your thang.
• Wellness for everyone. 99d are big on wellbeing & empowering every 99er to flourish. With annual wellness bonuses of $605 (to spend as you wish), 5x “wag” days of leave a year to take time off look after yourself + your wellbeing, access to their EAP Uprise for mindfulness, coaching & counselling, weekly online pilates & yoga classes, and a private wellness room in the office for prayer, pumping, finding a quiet moment or whatever + whenever else you might need some privacy.  
• Support for working parents. 18 weeks paid parental leave policy for all parents (they don’t distinguish between a primary and secondary carer), which can be accessed part time or any way you want it over the first 18 months, which you can access from day 1 of joining them. They also pay superannuation for paid and unpaid parental leave for 18months!
• Support for the community. In addition to 99nonprofits, 99d provides one paid volunteer day a year for you to support a charity and the community as you see fit (they also match all staff donations to charities and nonprofits dollar for dollar!) Everyone also has 3 additional days of cultural leave a year. 99d are also a Proud Code Like a Girl Gold Partner & maintain popular open source projects, and support a range of other community groups. It’s in their DNA.

Just a little bit curious?! Let’s have a chat to see if this can be your happy (work) place.

Kushla Egan
[email protected]

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