Engineering Manager - Salon Operations - UKI

Would you like to create the future of a product used by thousands of businesses and millions of consumers? Phorest Salon Software powers over 11,000 hair and beauty salons in Ireland, UK, Germany, Australia, Finland, USA, Canada, UAE and Netherlands and the platform processes 7 million appointments a month for hair and beauty consumers. Phorest is the number 1 salon software brand for premium independent salons in those markets and our next goal is to become a platform upon which other companies can build applications for premium salons.

Our system touches every point of the salon experience. We have the in-salon software desktop application, Phorest Go (the native staff application), online bookings website for salons, and custom native apps per salon. In a typical month, Phorest processes 3 million appointments and we send over 3 million SMS and 4 million emails. We process 200k online bookings per month and over 150 custom built white label native apps.

We are looking for a new Engineering Manager to join our Integrations & Partnerships team within the Salon Ops Group. You will join a team who are responsible for building and maintaining Phorest’s partnership platform by implementing integrations and exposing Phorest’s capabilities through our API. This empowers developers, partners, and clients to innovate, create new solutions, and drive growth within our ecosystem.

For this role, you will have the opportunity to be hands-on but instinctively focus on ensuring your team is set up for success first by removing any blockers. You will be a key member of this team, collaborating with the other engineers and facilitating the day-to-day running of the team. You will be responsible for growing, coaching and motivating a team of engineers to reach their own, and in turn Phorest’s goals. You will work closely with the Product Manager and Designer on the team to shape the strategy and also collaborate with other teams where there is a crossover of domains.

This is an exciting opportunity for someone who wants a new challenge, where you’ll bring your experience to a supportive, growth mindset environment that will enable us to achieve our goals. You will join a multidisciplinary group of technology, product and design folks in building the future of the hair and beauty industry.

What You’ll Do

• You will be responsible for leading the Integrations & Partnerships Engineering team within the Salon Ops domain of our product, including their overall health, productivity and impact.
• You will work with Engineering Managers, Product Leads and other key stakeholders to understand and shape the overarching strategy.
• You will work with your team to ensure an appropriate balance of new capabilities and technical maintenance is being carried out within each development cycle so that the technical health of the platform is conserved as the platform evolves.
• Help identify bottlenecks within the team, improve working processes, and ensure software delivery best practices are being used to our advantage.
• You will be responsible for tracking the progress outwards to the wider teams, ensuring new capabilities are released on time and to the required quality standards.
• You will champion the observability strategy within your team ensuring relevant service level objectives (SLOs) are set to measure and improve the system’s reliability. Your team will have the correct monitoring tooling in place and proactively identify and address issues.
• Drive a culture of quality within the team by establishing rigorous processes and methodologies. This will include maintaining high code quality standards, defining and implementing automated testing strategies and ensuring comprehensive test coverage for both new features and existing functionality.
• There is going to be hands-on work here, as a leader of this team you are going to need to understand how things work, there will be times when you will need to contribute to the team's work, review code and support them in designing and building complex distributed systems. You’ll help guide your team to design technical solutions that are appropriate in terms of scale, resilience and reliability.
• You will have direct people management responsibilities for a scrum team. This will require you to:

• Have regular 1 to 1s with each person to ensure they are happy and engaged in their work, as well as to coach them through any problems they are wrestling with.
• Provide regular feedback and periodic performance reviews.
• Understand each person’s long-term aspirations, helping them to set goals and carve out opportunities for growth in their career that are aligned with those goals.

Who You Are

• 3+ years demonstrated impact in a similar leadership role.
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a similar related field.
• Experience managing people.
• At least 5 years of professional experience is required, demonstrating strong proficiency in object-oriented software design. This experience should primarily be focused on API development and support, including 3rd-party integrations, utilizing languages such as Java and Kotlin.
• The ability to collaboratively lead the evolution of your team’s strategy, setting unambiguous roadmaps and goals for the team and then delivering on them in a healthy, predictable and sustainable way.
• You should be comfortable coaching team members. You will communicate expectations clearly and deliver individual feedback frequently.
• You have a proven history of building close working relationships with your product counterparts and external stakeholders, with the ability to inspire and motivate, improve quality and productivity, while maintaining technical innovation and excellence.
• Strategic thinker, with an ability to express and convey thoughts in meaningful ways in a fast paced and evolving environment, with a high degree of autonomy.
• Previous hands-on development experience with complex distributed systems.
• Experience working with and managing Agile teams, as well as driving improvement across the whole development process.
• Experience developing and supporting engineers in their personal growth and career progression. You foster an environment where communication, teamwork, and collaboration are rewarded.
• You’ll focus on quality, while increasing efficiency, delivering value and reducing waste.

Benefits

• Your wellbeing is important to us - we provide private healthcare, 2 Wellness Days, an employee assistance program and a free online GP service.
• As part of our Financial Wellbeing, we provide competitive Compensation, an Employee Share Purchase Scheme, Pension, Life Assurance, and Income Protection.
• We help you travel by providing a bike to work scheme as well as tax saver transport tickets.
• We support the women who work in Phorest by offering 2 weeks leave for Fertility Treatment, Pregnancy Loss and Menopause.
• We care for your family and provide Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Benefits.
• We grow our own timber! We provide a great learning environment and extensive development opportunities. We run development programs and provide access to many online resources including LinkedIn learning.
• Moving house? Phorest employees get 3 moving days.

Phorest is an equal opportunity employer. For this position, flexi-time and working from home is possible. We are also open to remote work. Get in touch to ask for more information or to chat about your future with Phorest!

Research shows that while men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other marginalised folks tend to only apply when they check every box. So if you think you have what it takes, but don’t necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still get in touch. We’d love to have a chat and see if you could be a great fit.