Software Engineering Manager

The Company

They own and develop the MyDyson smart home app, which is at the forefront of Dyson's IoT experience. They are proud of what they have built so far; they have an App Store and Google Play rating of 4.6 and 4.3 stars respectively, they have more than 1 million active users worldwide and their IoT platform has over 3 million connected Dyson machines. They have huge ambition to grow this platform and as they connect more machines from more categories the challenge is significant.

The Team

There are currently 8 scrum teams working on the app, located in the UK, Poland, and Singapore, each with up to 8 software engineers specialised in iOS development, Android development or mobile testing/automation, plus a scrum master and product owner. They all come from a variety of educational backgrounds and experience levels; not all of them are computer science graduates. They believe that teams composed of people from diverse backgrounds are more successful and innovative.

Their teams have the autonomy to manage their own work using frameworks such as Scrum or Kanban, each honing their ways of working through regular retrospectives and knowledge sharing. They all share a commitment to creating high-quality code, and engineers choose to follow practices such as pair programming, mobbing, and test-driven development. They also regularly share their knowledge and interests peer-to-peer through their developer Communities, which have led to the adoption of new technologies and improved cross-team collaboration.

They often need to interact with people from different parts of the business, such as embedded software and the cloud teams, so they plan in 5-sprint ‘increments’, based on the best bits of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). This gives them more visibility of upcoming work while remaining responsive and allows them to collaborate effectively with other teams within their 15,000-person organisation.

About the role

They are on the lookout for Engineering Managers to lead teams of mobile app engineers at Dyson. Communication, collaboration, self-evaluation, and a desire to improve are second nature to you, and you value good software engineering practices. You understand the need to deliver quality, alongside the need to deliver efficiently.

What you’ll be doing
- Working with your team to contribute features and improvements to the MyDyson app, ensuring they are robust, scalable and covered by tests.
- Conducting 1:1s with your team members, setting objectives that develop them towards their career goals, and evaluating their performance.
- Instilling a test-first attitude in our developers; helping our test engineers to write better code.
- Helping define and execute on a test strategy that ensures we deliver quality software.
- Working with your Engineering Manager peers to ensure teams are collaborating effectively and that the right choices are made.
- Working with everyone in the wider team: TPOs, Scrum Masters, cloud developers, UX/UI designers, and embedded software engineers
- Working with scrum masters on team development and monitoring metrics to assess progress.
- Working with TPOs and other stakeholders to assess risks and dependencies to aid decision making.
- Identifying new technologies and tools to help continually improve standards.

About you
- Minimally 10 years of experience in Software/App development with 2 years of people management experience.
- You’re interested in how technology can improve the environments people live in
- You’re a collaborative person that believes in the Agile principles and how they can help empowered teams deliver the best software.
- You’re passionate about learning new things and sharing those things with others.
- You know how to get the best work out of people, understanding the part played by motivations and working environment.
- You get satisfaction from solving real-world problems with well-crafted software.