Software Engineering Manager, Wayfinder

The Role

We are looking for a product-driven Software Engineering Manager to lead the team responsible for our vessel routing web application, Wayfinder. Wayfinder runs onboard the largest shipping vessels in the world, providing critical decision making context for sea captains as they navigate the world's oceans.

You will need to develop a deep understanding of our customers, their workflows, and the data they work with every day. You will collaborate with a top-notch team of engineers, ocean scientists, product designers, and maritime experts to translate these user needs into high quality software that empowers our users with data to get their work done more efficiently. You will drive your team to care about the details — great usability, polish, and a sense of delight are needed to make Wayfinder great.

Impact You’ll Own:

You will also hold your team to a high degree of engineering excellence, and contribute to architecture & other parts of the team’s technical strategy. There are hard technical problems to solve alongside the product ones — our web client needs to fetch, display, and analyze a large amount of weather information, often over an uncertain internet connection, while staying smooth, performant, and functional.

Success in this role looks like building a beautiful and useful application that allows the many humans of the shipping industry to get the full value out of our optimization and weather platform. Wayfinder saves our customers fuel, which directly reduces greenhouse gas emissions. It is rare in the software industry to find a role with as much direct climate impact as this one. You will be driven in equal measure by enabling our customers, and helping the planet and ocean.

You will also be responsible for recruiting, hiring, and retaining a team of IC engineers. The right candidate is able to evaluate the performance of engineers with various levels of experience, provide coaching and mentorship to help individuals level up their skills, and have difficult conversations when team members are not meeting expectations

About you

• Passionate about building a product with a positive impact on the world
• 2+ years experience as an Engineering Manager, responsible for people management and feature delivery on a technical team
• A solid communicator who enjoys collaborating with designers, PMs, scientists, and go-to-market functions
• A considerate technical leader who can evaluate the tradeoffs between various engineering approaches and guide the team towards the best choice
• Strong knowledge of how modern cloud applications and the web work
• Professional experience with modern Typescript, React, and (preferably) Node.js
• Experience hiring for and leading teams at a fast-growing startup is a plus
• Experience working with weather data or with the maritime industry generally would be helpful but are not necessary

Estimated Salary Range

• $170,000 - $220,000
• The range listed is what we reasonably expect to pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range and may be modified in the future. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, experience, and equity package.

Sofar's Commitment to Climate Justice

We at Sofar Ocean acknowledge that careers in the marine sciences “... have traditionally been, and remain, non-diverse work environments”, thereby limiting the entry and prosperity of underrepresented groups in the space. (Johri et al., 2021) Many of these same groups are disproportionately affected by climate change, and are often excluded from decision making that directly address their interests and needs.

We are committed to addressing these climate injustices and highly encourage people who identify as women, LGBTQ+, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) to apply.