Overview

The Wirecutter is seeking a passionate, results-oriented, inventive software engineering manager to lead the Website and Content Management team. This is a new position that reports to the Director of Engineering and manages one of our two distributed engineering teams.  Successful candidates thrive in a fast-paced environment, prioritize well, communicate clearly, motivate team members, and ship quality features that achieve business goals.

As the engineering manager, you will have technical ownership of our websites and Content Management System. You will manage a talented team of 4+ engineers to build the next generation of our publishing platform, content APIs, and front-end architecture. You are comfortable working remotely, and ideally have experience working with a distributed development team. You are a leader, but you still have solid coding chops and strive to use the best tool for the job. Though you will not be expected to regularly code, you will need to fully grasp code and architecture concerns.

We have a strong focus on scale, reliability, performance and product agility, and that means picking the right tool for the job, while being pragmatic and flexible. We welcome new ideas and technologies. You will be critical in deciding exactly what technologies we use.

Who are we?

Founded five years ago by journalists fed up with the time and energy it takes to shop, The Wirecutter (which includes its sister site The Sweethome) developed a simpler approach to giving buying advice: just tell people exactly what to get in one single guide. The company’s purpose: to help people find great things, quickly and easily.  Through rigorous testing, research, reporting, and whatever means necessary, they create straightforward recommendations that save readers from unnecessary stress, time, and effort.  We then monetize these guides by enabling our readers to easily purchase the products they are interested in.

The Wirecutter was recently acquired by, and is now a subsidiary of The New York Times Company.  As part of the acquisition, the Times is investing in expanding The Wirecutter through editorial category expansion and new product features and integrations.

Responsibilities:

  • Articulate and drive technical vision in the form of technology recommendations, ideas, and approaches aligned with our product and business goals
  • Own the efficiency, growth, and delivery of the team, making sure the team is as productive as possible to complete short term and long term objectives
  • Collaborate with the product team on the technical scope and product requirements of development projects
  • Create technical plans and lead implementation efforts for complex projects, refactoring, and optimization efforts
  • Identify internal and external resources required to support the product development schedule; work with the Director of Engineering to ensure that these resources are assigned to the project
  • Coordinate successful product and feature rollouts
  • Champion build automation, continuous integration, unit and acceptance testing, and other best practices
  • Lead and manage a remote team of 4+ engineers, conducting regular 1:1s with all direct reports
  • Proactive talent growth and mentorship for team members through just-in-time feedback, personal goals, task assignments, and other professional development plans
  • Own and continuously refine the processes and communication strategies your team uses to build and support products

Qualifications

  • 1+ year(s) of managing experience or tech leadership on a small team
  • 5+ years of software development experience at scale
  • 3+ years of experience with content management or publishing systems
  • A deep understanding of software development in a team, and a track record of shipping software on time
  • Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, both written and in person
  • Exceptional customer relationship skills including the ability to discover the true requirements underlying feature requests, recommend alternative technical and business approaches, and lead engineering efforts to meet aggressive timelines with optimal solutions
  • Experience with object oriented design and object oriented languages
  • Strong leadership, project & logistics management, and people mentoring skills
  • Passion for The New York Times’s and The Wirecutter’s mission and commitment to be a part of our innovation and growth

Culture and benefits at The New York Times Company and The Wirecutter

  • Though The Wirecutter has physical locations in both NYC and LA, the company promotes and encourages a remote workforce, so that our employees can work in flexible and comfortable ways.
  • We are committed to career development, supported by a formal mentoring program as well as tuition reimbursement.  The New York Times Company offers frequent panel discussions and talks by industry leaders (Sheryl Sandberg, Melinda Gates and Ta-Nehisi Coates are a few recent examples), that we encourage our employees to attend.
  • We believe diversity fuels innovation and creativity, and we have a variety of employee groups and task forces across The New York Times Company and The Wirecutter dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace.
  • We offer a generous parental leave policy, which was recently expanded in response to employee feedback.  Birth mothers receive 16 weeks fully paid, adoptive parents and birth fathers receive 10 weeks also fully paid.  Similarly, we offer competitive health and dental insurance, as well as 401k matching.

About The Wirecutter

The Wirecutter, and its associated sites, are about helping people find the best gear to buy using dozens of hours of research of all available sources and our own testing.

What’s different in how we do things is our directness in recommending people exactly what we would buy ourselves or recommend to our loved ones--we don’t ask people who are looking for our advice to click through multiple pages of reviews or meaningless industry news to exploit them for advertising inventory. We just give them our recommendation in a single page, and the evidence of why that is and why they should believe us, and let them them get on with their lives. It's that simple.

You may be aware that we run our company in service of our readers. Less known is our commitment to the people with which we work. We ask everyone who works here to be effective, to be efficient, and to move the needle every day.

In exchange, we offer you the ability to work from wherever on your own hours for competitive pay at a reasonable pace. We love working with people who can get it done in a world-class way and can communicate well with a team, and who know how to enjoy a balanced life outside of work.

Salary and perks: Although we are a small, bootstrapped company, we pride ourselves in offering competitive compensation including, but not limited to, healthcare coverage, PTO, and a flexible work schedule. We want to make sure every employee is happy and has the tools, resources, and knowledge to grow with the company.