Senior Engineering Manager / Head of Engineering (Python)

Location: Central Asia

About the Role

The Engineering Manager position at Super Dispatch involves overseeing a team of 5-15 direct reports, including engineers and team leads, and contributing to the growth of Super Dispatch products. We are particularly interested in candidates from Central Asian regions.

In this role, collaboration with various departments such as Growth, Operations, Engineering, Data Science, Product, Design, Sales, and Marketing is essential to bring innovative ideas to fruition. Key responsibilities encompass people management, team execution, business value delivery, and technical leadership. As an adept technical leader, and supported by tech leads in your team, you will take ownership of both technical and process-related aspects within your team.

Your onboarding process, guided by your manager, will include mentorship and coaching. Together, you will define success criteria and develop a 3-6-12-month plan aligned with your goals. We strongly believe in empowering managers to guide their teams effectively, enabling rapid growth for team members while fostering a sense of ownership and responsibility.

What You'll Do

You will collaborate with leadership to create and communicate the vision, high-level roadmap, and technical strategy for your team, ensuring every engineer understands how their project contributes to the company goals. You will set the direction for your engineering team, anticipate strategic and scaling-related challenges via long-term planning. You will measure performance of the team and improve it.

Most of what you'll do can be divided into the following 3 categories.

You will manage people.

• Coach and mentor.
• Conduct regular 1-on-1s.
• Guide career growth and provide development opportunities.
• Conduct regular performance reviews.
• Delegate responsibilities.
• Help build a healthy and collaborative culture rewarding strategic failure as well as success.
• Ensure team health and knowledge sharing.
• Identify the headcount needs of your team.
• Identify technical skills gaps for recruitment and upskilling current team members.
• Plan and execute the recruitment efforts for your team.
• Onboard new hires or new team members.
• Measure velocity and quality of engineers’ contributions and improve it.

You will manage team execution and delivery.

• You will work with a product manager and the team to draft and distribute well-written requirements into reasonably sized cards. You will define periodic delivery milestones within engineering resource and business requirement constraints. You will validate that the deliverables are meeting product and business requirements before they are released.
• You will track the team’s efficiency and quality of deliverables at SDLC and regularly adjust processes and timelines to ensure high quality is delivered.
• You will identify bottlenecks in the process and roadblocks to success for your team and clear these roadblocks.
• You will monitor execution and delivery for the engineering team, identifying risks and solutions, and driving improvements.
• You will ensure alignment across teams.

You will provide technical leadership.

• You will own a large responsibility for producing software that is highly available, monitorable, and maintainable over time.
• When needed, you will be hands-on in the software development process. You will spend less time writing code, but you will be willing to get your hands dirty to help your team achieve their goals. You will set a high standard on coding, testing, deployment, and monitoring.
• You will be expected to understand what the team is doing, the details, and the trade-offs the team is making, even if you are not necessarily doing the code reviews or writing the code.
• You will act as a leader for the technical roadmap of your team.
• You will identify areas of strategic technical debt, do the cost/benefit analysis for resolving this debt, and communicate suggested timelines for prioritizing this to the management team.

• You have Advanced-level English skills, especially Speaking and Writing, big plus the knowledge of Russian.
• You have at least 4+ years of experience managing a team of 5-15 people (full-stack, backend, mobile), across various technologies.
• You have managed process and organizational design improvements, and hired and supported successful teams.
• You have demonstrated experience in Agile management practices.
• You have delivered several large projects (in the context of your team) successfully in the past 3 years.
• You have 5+ years of experience developing software as an IC engineer.
• You have a strong technical background as a Senior Engineer for at least 4 years on the web backend written in Python programming languages

• As a manager, you’ll provide daily guidance to people whose job is to build software and solve technical problems.
• It’s crucial that you’re able to recognize bad patterns and help your team avoid them. We expect managers to identify areas in which their teams need technical guidance, and either provide it themselves or find help from experts outside the team. They should also be able to ask detailed questions to guide their team to good solutions.
• We are looking for engineering managers who are experienced engineers, and when presented with a problem can quickly identify and focus on the difficult parts. We want to see candidates recognize where complexities might arise in their design, and what parts of their solution might break at scale.

• You have managed engineering teams at startups before, particularly during periods of rapid growth and organizational change.
• You have experience rolling out engineering and management practices and processes—e.g., code review, performance reviews, and levels and ladders—where they didn't exist before.
• You've managed teams that are partially (or entirely) remote.
• Significant experience in designing and operating critical systems.

Summary of Benefits:

• Stock options
• Unlimited Vacation (PTO)
• Fully remote/work from home role
• Gym membership/wellness stipend
• English classes
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave
• Growth opportunities