Who are we?

Our vision is of a global community of individuals empowered to pursue the work they love. Our mission is to grow that community by transforming millions of thinkers into creators.

Since 2011, General Assembly has transformed tens of thousands of careers through pioneering, experiential education in today’s most in-demand skills. As featured in The Economist, Wired, and The New York Times, GA offers training in web development, data, design, business, and more, both online and at campuses around the world. Our global professional community boasts 40,000 full- and part-time alumni — and counting.

In addition to fostering career growth for individuals, GA helps employers cultivate top tech talent and spur innovation by transforming their teams through strategic learning. More than 21,000 employees at elite companies worldwide have honed their digital fluency with our corporate training programs. GA has also been recognized as one of Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500, and Fast Company has dubbed us leaders in World-Changing Ideas as well as the #1 Most Innovative Company in Education.

About This Position

The Director of Software Engineering leads all software engineering efforts at General Assembly across integrated learning environments, websites, marketing technology, back-office systems, DevOps, and technology operations. Reporting to the VP of Technology, the Director oversees multiple teams of engineers embedded in a matrix Product organization. This is a highly collaborative role, working with executive management, peer leaders, designers, product managers, customers, vendors, and other contributors, to deliver innovative, curated learning experiences enabled by seamless technology services. 

Responsibilities

• Provides technical strategy and oversight, identifies synergies across Engineering and Product teams, and realizes opportunities for growth. Creates business value amongst software efforts across all teams.
• Oversees multiple projects across different Engineering teams with mastery understanding of dependency management in complex projects.
• Mentors and coaches engineering managers and individual contributors, fostering ownership, guiding personal growth, and constantly striving to raise the bar on delivery performance and quality.
• Owns SDLC standards for teams, partnering with senior engineering members to define team practices. Provides guidance when necessary on methodologies, development tool workflows, coding standards, testing strategies, and production system operations. Enables autonomy across their team once quality standards are in place.
• Guides technical architecture decisions within applications, across solutions, and spanning the entire enterprise in collaboration with senior engineers and other technology leaders.
• Accountable for the uptime of all software and systems managed by Engineering. Owns, supports, and drives improvements for on-call and incident response procedures, while assuring a healthy balance/culture in assuring high priority production issues are handled quickly and efficiently 24x7.
• Owns end-to-end budget visibility for Engineering. Works with the VP of Technology on all Engineering budgetary items. Includes financial responsibility, tracking, contract negotiation, and staffing.
• Accountable for the end-to-end hiring function for Engineering. Actively recruits outside talent for GA and participates in external functions that help recruit for GA. Responsible for interviewing and acting as the ultimate decision-maker in the interview processes for all their teams, coaching toward the optimal outcome for the team's health. Assures all hires meet and exceed the GA talent bar. Support and facilitates a documented process for efficient onboarding / offboarding.
• Maintains 1-1 meetings with staff and has clearly defined development commitments for all. Provides material feedback on the work for team members. Runs formal feedback and review processes as required. Ensures a transparent plan is in place for each direct report, outlining their desired next step in their career and the steps required to get them there.
• Provides thought leadership and insight into emerging trends.
• Sets and maintains professional standards for the entire organization.

Expectations

• Has a hands-on cross-disciplinary engineering and architecture background, with substantial expertise in multiple programming environments and advanced concepts at scale.
• Usually at least 10 years of experience as a professional software engineer in a relevant discipline.
• Understands end-to-end systems and software development life cycle (SDLC). 
• Expert-level knowledge of source control tooling and practices.
• Fully capable of owning and running entire subsystems of work. Able to step in and run subsystems across all their teams, working within the organization's engineering tools and software.
• Able to review work produced by their team when required.
• Capable of guiding the successful execution of projects across their team.
• Finds common ground quickly and solve problems for the good of all without disruption. Exemplifies being a team player. Continuously gains trust and support of others.