Software Engineering Manager

About us 

Climate X is a purpose-driven climate adaptation data company set to revolutionise how the world manages assets, property, and infrastructure.  

We give our customers meaningful insights into how our changing climate will impact their property. From individuals with one property to businesses with millions of assets, our platform displays risks from potentially damaging severe weather events across multiple climate change scenarios and calculates the cost of that damage to the asset valuation.  

Climate X will help customers save millions of pounds, be more resilient to climate change, meet incoming regulatory requirements and make smarter investment decisions.  

We work with the UK’s leading climate scientists, AI specialists and financial services professionals.  

We advocate diversity with our founders, team, and investors from various backgrounds. We’re not building just a team but a place of innovation where problem-solving and fun coexist to address the most significant challenge our society is facing now.  

 
About the role  

We're looking for an engineering manager to support a team of around 6-8 software engineers. This is a people management role rather than an individual contributor software engineering role, but it will be useful if you have worked as a software engineer in the past and have a close familiarity with how modern software engineering works (e.g. agile working, DevOps, DORA metrics, continuous integration). Our current tech stack is AWS / Python / React.JS / Postgres / GIS (although some of this might change in future). We are currently organising our work into 3-week sprints (this could change in the future too). Tech team collaborates closely with both Science team (who generate the data which tells customers about the future climate) and Product team (who have a deep understanding of our customers and their present and future needs), so cross-team collaboration and execution is important for this role, although it's not as important as developing people. 
 
This person will have an impact primarily through developing the people in their team, although organisation, planning and communication within the team and across the company will also be important.  

The role is based in our London office (near Moorgate / Liverpool St) and you will need to be there at least 3 days / week, so you need to be either already based in London or ok to relocate to London. We can provide UK visa sponsorship for this role.

The responsibilities of the role are described below, and (spoiler!) the interview questions will be along the lines of "tell me about a time when you did <one of the things listed below>". 

People 

• Creates an inclusive environment in their team, seeks out feedback and adapts ways of working to enable their people to do their best work. 
• Sets meaningful development goals and milestones for their reports. 

• Can lead conversations around what their engineers need to demonstrate to progress. 
• Aligns the growth of their engineers with the success of their team. 
• Actively develops the people in their team. 
• Hires top talent: takes part in interviews and ensures their engineers are taking part in hiring where appropriate, and that their feedback is well calibrated. 
• Retains their people - proactively identifies flight risks and takes meaningful steps to solve the underlying problem. 

• Seeks out, composes and delivers constructive feedback to their reports. 
• Helps their people to independently pull and deliver feedback. 
• Ensures new joiners in their team are set up for success. 
• Sets a high bar for individual performance. 
• Appropriately manages performance concerns. 

• Clearly and concisely represents their engineers in calibration and promotion forums. 

Team and execution 
 

• Creates a culture of ownership and accountability within their team. 
• Pushes for decisions to be made effectively and removes blockers that impede team progress. 
• Drives team goals forward by organizing the team’s work and setting appropriate milestones. 

• Empowers engineers to achieve a high bar of engineering excellence in their work, creating space for testing, automation, observability, documentation 
• Proactively escalates issues in a timely manner with delivery to appropriate stakeholders. 
• Keeps the team directionally aligned with their goals. 
• Proactively manages incidents (as incident manager) directly affecting their team or area. 
• Ensures the team owns the operations of their systems. 

• Sets up on-call rotas, ensures playbooks are created and pushes for teams to fully understand the contributing factors to any incidents. 
• Creates effective systems for managing work. 
• Maintains a healthy shipping cadence by balancing short and long term priorities, and appropriately unblocking others when needed. 

Leadership 

• Fosters a healthy dynamic within their team or area, leads on resolving interpersonal conflicts.
• Builds an excellent relationship with relevant peers (product, design, data, compliance etc).
• Aligns on key strategic decisions.
• Communicates team progress against milestones at an appropriate cadence to relevant stakeholders.
• Raises the visibility of the team’s work in the wider organisation, recognising both individual and team achievements.
• Helps messages about company or wider collective changes land consistently in their team, taking cues from their manager. Makes sure everyone understands and is comfortable with those changes.
• Seeks out feedback on key decisions or approaches from other engineering managers and teammates. 

Applying for this role – if in doubt, do it!  

We've tried to make the hiring process as easy and transparent as possible. That's because we want to respect your time and help you succeed if you apply.  

If you don't tick every box in the job description or think there are different ways to shine that our job ad doesn't quite capture, it's okay! We encourage you to apply anyway instead of not applying at all!  

If there are any adjustments, we can make to help make the process easier for you, for example, if you have a disability or a different way of working that we should be aware of – please let us know, and we'll do our best to help.  

If you want to build something that matters to the world and are ready to join our team on this journey, apply now!