In his essay “You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss”, Paul Graham argues that humans evolved for hunter-gatherer-sized groups—eight being the ideal number. James C. Scott’s “Seeing Like a State” notes how 1800s bureaucrats attempted to impose process on the land, planting the single fastest growing tree species in a grid—and were met with rampant forest fire and disease.

These authors make an excellent point. You can get a lot done as an eight-person team (Mercury launched with a team of nine), and imposing too much structure can be fatal. At the same time, scale has clearly won out: Graham’s Y Combinator now employs over 80 people, and the best permaculturists can’t compete with modern tree farms.

Your job as an engineering manager at Mercury is to balance this tension, creating structure with clear purpose to help your team reach its full potential.

In this role, you’ll:

• Lead a team of ~4-8 engineers.
• Ensure your team can predictably deliver results against company objectives.
• Create a fulfilling work environment for your team.
• Coach the team to a high level of technical excellence and stability.
• Have the confidence and competence to give feedback to engineers of all skill levels.
• Onboard new engineering hires.
• Align engineering work with Mercury values.
• Work alongside other product experts to pick the highest-impact projects.
• Collaborate with other teams when work overlaps, ideally to achieve a more cohesive product and simpler, more maintainable underlying technical implementation.
• Balance building new things with maintaining existing systems.
• Empower your team to thrive and contribute to making Mercury’s product reliable, beautiful, and useful.

You should:

• Have demonstrated the ability to lead a technical team.
• Have a strong individual engineering skill set. You will go through roughly the same interview process as our individual contributors, with additional interviews for manager skills.
• Be familiar with our tech stack (specifically, Haskell, and TypeScript), or have an interest in learning it.

We encourage you to try our demo site if you’re interested in applying for the role.

The total rewards package at Mercury includes base salary, equity (stock options), and benefits. Our salary and equity ranges are highly competitive within the SaaS and fintech industry and are updated regularly using the most reliable compensation survey data for our industry. New hire offers are made based on a candidate’s experience, expertise, geographic location, and internal pay equity relative to peers.

Our target new hire base salary ranges for this role are the following:

• US employees (any location): $203,100-238,900 USD
• Canadian employees (any location): CAD 184,800 - 217,400

Mercury values diversity & belonging and is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All individuals seeking employment at Mercury are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities or special needs. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.

We use Covey as part of our hiring and / or promotional process for jobs in NYC and certain features may qualify it as an AEDT. As part of the evaluation process we provide Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications. We began using Covey Scout for Inbound on January 22, 2024. Please see the independent bias audit report covering our use of Covey here.

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