Director of Engineering

Interview Loop

Round 1 - Recruiter Screen 45m w/ Molly

• Objective: General career overview + experience, HR housekeeping
  • Walk me through your background and how you progressed to the role you are in today.
    • What is the scope of current role? Coding v. Management v. Long term strategy
    • What teams are you managing? where in the stack do they code? how are they structured
  • What is your management style? How do you build trust with direct reports?
    • Have you ever had to manage someone through a performance plan? If so, what was the outcome?
  • Timeline, work auth, comp

Round 2 - Hiring Manager Call 45m w/ JT

• Objective: Functional career overview, work ethic and engineering rigor
  • Dive deeper into any topics that stood out on Career trajectory call w/ Molly
  • Walk me through an example of a product you built. What were the major challenges you were trying to solve? How did you do vs. initial expectations? Why?
  • How do you assess an engineering teams performance? How do you manage team velocity? Tell me about a time when team velocity was low on a previous team. How did you fix it?
  • What would you consider to be the three most critical elements to build a successful Engineering org?

Round 3- Cross Functional Collaboration - 60m w/ Liz + Susanna (or should SP have 1:1)

• Objective/Competencies: Dedicated to meeting the expectations and requirements of internal and external customers. Leading a team through ambiguity with urgency
  • Tell me about a time when it was important to maintain your productivity and quality in spite of significant changes at work. What were the changes? How did you handle the situation? What were the results?
  • Describe a time when you made meeting and exceeding customer requirements a driving force behind your activities and decisions. Who were the customers and how did you clarify the needs? To what extent did you involve others? What were the results?
  • Share a time when you actively gathered information to measure stakeholder satisfaction. How did you gather the information? How did you use it to improve customer service?

Round 4 - 75m Technical Presentation w/ Panel ( Sam, Rylan (Marco?), Lucy? + JT)

• Objective/Competencies: Technical aptitude + project management and leadership
  • Prompt: Please prepare a short 20 minute presentation on a specific project - a new product or feature that you led a team through design, implementation, and release. Our goal for the session is to gain an understanding of where you excel as a technical leader and what it will be like to work with you. We are more interested in depth than breadth - help us understand the work that you personally did, including refining an idea into a plan, turning your plan into working software, and measuring results.

Round 5 - Product and Engineering 45m w/ Chris (or JT/Lucy??)

• Objective/Competencies:

Round 6- Wrap Up 30m w/ JT

• Objective/Competencies:

Engineering Team Meet + Greet (scheduled at the end of the loop)

• 15m w/ Dashboard

• 15m w/ DPI

• hellos and get to know each other, not a weighted interview

• Nick or Dan? (only for closing)

Questions (from me about the role)

• is this person going to need to contribute code?
  • yes
  • to start - building internal trust - showing their skills to eng team and the why behind their talent
  • 15% - in the code
  • mobiles a plus (R. Native)
• how many yrs/what kind of director level leadership would be exciting?
  • my thought is at least one experience within a similar stage/size start up
  • ^^^ paired with a few years as an EM at a start up (seed-seriesB)
  • ideally someone who has scaled a team and product
    • would be especially interested in how they would look at hiring against current talent and how to stack skills to be efficient
• Would you consider VP?

Job Description

Hi! We're Forerunner.

We believe that climate adaptation is a necessity, not a luxury, and communities deserve access to powerful software that helps them plan for the future. The challenge of climate change is complex – it implicates how municipalities plan, manage capital, and communicate to both residents and higher levels of government. Forerunner helps local communities do these things better by empowering them to access, understand, and mobilize local-level flood risk data at scale.

The Role

We are looking to bring on a Director of Engineering to lead the engineering org through our next stage of growth.

The engineering team at Forerunner strives to be small but dedicated, working relentlessly to help local governmental bodies and their floodplain managers reason about the flooding risks that all communities face in the USA. The domain is complicated, nuanced, and rapidly changing, and we at Forerunner break down this complexity for our users so they can do what truly matters - fight against climate change and the possible loss of homes in the case of flooding.

Engineers at Forerunner can work remotely from anywhere within the United States, so long as they are willing to work on either Eastern or Central timezones. We offer schedule flexibility and ask for accountability in return. We are unable to sponsor H1-B visas at this time, so permanent residency or citizenship is required.

Our tech stack and other engineering tools include, but are not limited to:

• Typescript / React.js / React Native frontend with jest for testing
• GraphQL API powered by a Node.js / Typescript backend with jest for testing.
• Postgres as our database, alongside heavy use of postgis
• git, Github and Github Actions for code review and CI
• Deployment to AWS using ECS and similar products
• A variety of other cloud providers, such as GCP

While expertise with all of the technologies above is by no means not necessary, a working understanding of at least a few of them is required.

We strongly encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply - the problem of climate change impact all of us, and we want to reflect that within our team's composition.

What You'll Do

As the Director of Engineering at Forerunner you will:

• Manage 2-3 Technical Lead Managers that guide our team of full stack engineers
• Partner with Leadership team to build efficiency and efficacy across the engineering organization while scaling the team and product.
• Construct measurable success metrics to provide clear guidance around performance expectations within each level on the engineering team.
• Code alongside the engineering team to show what engineering excellence looks like.
• Guide the Engineering team to add accuracy to planning and estimation of tickets to ensure we achieve our goals.
• Collaborate with our Talent & People Lead to identify, hire and onboarding key engineering talent as the team scales.
• Build internal structure suitable for scaling with a culture that fosters growth, collaboration, quality and customer empathy.
• Partner with the Product Lead to build out best practices and resource plan against upcoming efforts.
• Drives consensus across engineering, product, design, and customer success to determine priority projects.

What We Offer

Forerunner is an early stage company with an interdisciplinary team. We are motivated by seemingly intractable problems and work hard to support one another.

We're mission-driven. Our mission orients our business strategy and pushes us to work with a sense of urgency. We’re in the weeds - our entire team spends time engaging with our partners in the field to better understand the real-world problems they face.

We're a small team. As a member of our growing team, you will quickly become an invaluable part of our organization and have a meaningful impact on our business and technical direction. We welcome unique perspectives and backgrounds. Your opinion matters and we hope you'll share it.

We build each other up. A team works best when its members are adequately equipped with the tools to tackle the problems they are facing. Forerunner strives to provide adequate feedback and appropriate learning opportunities to help all its team members expand their skills.

We want you to be happy and healthy. Forerunner offers competitive compensation, health/vision/dental coverage, a 401k plan, and one expensed lunch per week. We also have a quarterly wellness reimbursement so that you can have flexibility in defining what “health” means to you.

The salary range for this position is $200,000- 300,000. This posting may span more than one career level. Compensation is determined based on a variety of factors, including an individual’s skills, experience, qualifications, and working location.