VP of Engineering

The Company

Swan is a leading Bitcoin-only financial services company supporting individuals and companies throughout their Bitcoin journey. We hire passionate Bitcoiners who want to work with a self-motivated and fully distributed startup team.

The Role

As VP of Engineering at Swan, you will help scale Swan as it enters into its growth phase as a the biggest and most trusted brand in Bitcoin-only financial services. You’ll be leading the engineering team by organizing, planning, mentoring, and guiding developers.

Our team is very product and customer focused, so a love of product, and, of course, a love of Bitcoin, are first and foremost. You’ll work closely with the CPO to identify the best ways to achieve business and product goals and the CTO in order to achieve technical initiatives. This is a hands on role involving architecture, implementation, and team leadership.

We are looking for someone who has a wide range of experience, is extremely proactive, can see around corners, and loves to move quickly while working on big technical problems.

This is a remote position in a fully remote company, but requires location in the American time zones, which is the locus of our engineering team.

Your responsibilities

• Product planning, team structure, and hands on project management for critical path projects
• Be inspiring and motivating to engineers, finding ways to match the right work with the best people
• Lead from the front lines, get involved deeply in technical projects from an architecture and project management standpoint, and be extremely active in online communication in a fully remote company setting of over 100 employees
• Act as a force multiplier for the engineering team, adopting Shape Up practices, helping people move fast, QA, ship, and be successful
• Believe in culture over process and enabling developers to be product owners
• Want to balance quick iteration and delivery with long-term investment in scale
• Work closely with senior management and teams in other departments across product, client services, operations, and other functions to identify gaps, design solutions, and drive the team to execution

Skills and experience that will help you succeed

• A solid technical background with the ability to act as a sounding board for developers making technical and user experience tradeoff decisions
• Excellent interpersonal skills with a desire to lead, mentor, and help engineers level up as developers and team leaders
• A focus on process improvements, documentation, coding standards, error rate reduction, and on-call rotation management, owning MTTR and similar metrics.
• Background as a developer - you won’t necessarily write code but being comfortable in GitHub, reviewing PR’s, and helping with architectural decisions like data modeling, naming, etc, is needed.
• Recruiting and Hiring - strong network of developers to source, recruit, and hire team members as the business grows
• Infrastructure and security experience is a major plus. Solid application security awareness is a minimum requirement.
• Experience leading a team of 30+ engineers
• A strong head for tradeoffs and difficult decision making in a rapidly changing environment.
• 15 years of technical expertise with at least 5-10 years in team leadership. Exceptions for experience can be made for demonstrated leadership at startups at scale.
• Strong background in mobile, with experience shipping production apps a huge plus.
• Located in United States, in any time zone (anywhere from Pacific to Eastern)

Here's a bit about our culture

• We’re a growing team: Fully distributed across the world, Slack and Huddles are huge here.
• We’re very flat: Leadership is desired and encouraged; we hire people who care about and use the product they are working on.
• We’re Bitcoiners: We find solutions that encourage Bitcoin principles. We are often involved in the Bitcoin community through writing, podcasts, conferences, open source projects, and time spent on Twitter to help educate the masses. We love Bitcoin, and it comes through in our daily chats, meetings, and actions.

Join us, become a Swan!