About the company:
37signals.

Who we are:
An eclectic crew united by intellectual curiosity and a commitment to creating truly great products.

We’re a fully-remote company with no physical headquarters. We’re collectively spread out across dozens of cities on multiple contintents. Everyone is free to live and work wherever they choose.

We run the gamut in geography, lifestyle, and interest, but we’re all here to do exceptional work, build wonderfully novel, straightforward products, experiment, pay attention to the details, treat people right, tell the truth, teach, give back, and keep learning.

For 23 years we’ve operated a no-nonsense, profitable business that makes more money than it spends. We’re fully independent, self-funded, and answer to no one but ourselves and our customers. In addition to Basecamp and HEY, we invented the Ruby on Rails programming framework and have written a number of best-selling, influential books.

Salary fork:
17250 USD per month gross
(207 978 USD per year gross)
 

Type of work:
Remote
 
Type of employment:
Full-time
 
Job description:
37signals is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead our Basecamp and HEY product development teams.

In this role you'll help build and lead cohesive, high-performing teams. You'll smooth the path for programmers, affording them deep focus on product delivery, and ensuring we only ship great work. You'll be involved in project coordination, overseeing product delivery, and you'll play a key role in hiring and onboarding new talent.

Here are real examples of the work you’ll be doing:

• Overseeing the Shape Up process for your teams. Working with programmers, designers and Ops staff, coordinating with other teams, management and leadership to prioritize schedules, scope hammer features, write Heartbeats and Kickoffs every cycle.
• Chatting regularly one-to-one with programmers, listening to their concerns, making sure they’re feeling engaged and productive, and providing specific feedback on performance – both the good and the not-so-good.
• Running formal performance reviews with programmers throughout the year. Bringing improvements to the process so we can better track personal achievements as well as areas for improvement, and know when to offer new challenges. Make it clearer when to promote, and when to let go.
• Catching up regularly with colleagues from the Commercial team, Support and Design to develop healthy working relationships and gain a strong understanding of the business and our culture.
• Scope the programming requirements of our commercial team for a new marketing project, bringing a well-formed pitch to the betting table for an upcoming cycle.
• Coordinate a series of video walkthroughs of our internal systems, and write articles to improve our internal programmers guide.
• Collaborate with QA, SIP, support and product leadership to determine our appetite for addressing our prioritized bugs and issues for each product, bringing the work to the table during cycle planning.
• Run a retrospective to reflect back on a cycle, using it as an opportunity to celebrate achievements, discover ways to improve as a team, and to identify and remove roadblocks.
• Participate in our incident response process as a coordinator of major incidents, following up on actions and ensuring they’re seen through to resolution.
• Oversee our 2023 summer internship program. You’ll be helping hire and onboard our 2023 cohort, and coaching programmers as they take on intern mentoring responsibilities.
• Alongside our People team and Director of Engineering, hire and onboard new Rails programmers: filtering resumes, conducting interviews, evolving our interview playbook.
  
  Position requirements:
  You have an empathetic yet pragmatic leadership style, and you’re able to foster strong relationships with those in your teams, and those around you. You get energy from helping programmers thrive, and you’ll help clear the path for them to ship work of the highest technical quality without micromanaging. You have strong organization skills, the ability to manage multiple priorities, and you can demonstrate excellent judgment.
  
  You will have at least two years experience in an engineering manager role following a successful career as a senior individual contributor.
  
  You can expect a smooth onboarding process with structured ramp-up time. You can expect teams that listen and learn. You can expect to be counted on, and you'll be given the freedom to do your best work. We build our apps, our teams, and our company for the long haul, so you can build your career here if you choose to.
  
  As a globally distributed team, the bulk of our work is written – from the long-form proposals we make, the code and interfaces we design, to the pull request discussions we have – so being a good writer is important.
  
  Working conditions:
  This is a remote job. You’re free to work where you work best: home office, co-working space, coffeeshops. We are primarily hiring from the Americas, Africa, or Europe. Our teams are currently spread across the US and western Europe, so your working hours should overlap with theirs.
  
  What it’s like to work here
  A calm, low-distraction environment where you can do your best work.

We work hard to make sure every employee is given the freedom, tools, trust, and support to do the best work of their careers. That’s why so many people who work at 37signals stay at 37signals.

We respect everyone’s right to participate in political expression and activism, but we avoid having political debates on our internal communication systems. 37signals as a company also does not weigh in on politics publicly, outside of topics directly related to our business. You should be at peace with both of these stances.

We value a calm company and deliberate, concerted effort. You’ll have fewer meetings, hardly any email, and far fewer interruptions than you’re used to. 8-hour days and 40-hour weeks are plenty of time to do great work, so that’s all we expect.

It’ll take some getting used to if you’ve been immersed in ASAP culture, but after a while you’ll wonder how you worked any other way.

We work in small, independent teams, typically on a 6 week cycle. Everyone at 37signals participates in Everyone On Support every few months, and twice a year we all get together in Chicago to work and play together. Read our employee handbook for more details on what it’s like to work at 37signals. 
 
Pay and benefits
37signals pays in the top 10% of the industry based on San Francisco rates. Same position, same pay, no matter where you live. The salary for an Engineering Manager is $207,978.

Our benefits support a life well-lived away from work. Ample time off and all the resources you need to support you in doing the best work of your career. Make sure you check out the benefits and perks. Spoiler: they’re great.

Applicants from outside the US will be offered a contractor role with comparable terms and at the same rate of pay as our US-based employees.

How to apply
Please submit an application by Monday, October 10 at 5:00PM US-Central time. Introduce yourself to us as a colleague. Tell us why you want this job and why you’d like to work at 37signals. We value great writers, so be yourself, be creative, and take your time.

We expect to take a few weeks to closely review all applications. Please note that we’re unable to offer individual feedback during the screening process. We usually see hundreds of applications for roles, and our small hiring team simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to offer personalized feedback before the interview stage.

Interviews will take place in October, and we'll also ask some final candidates to complete a take-home written exercise. We hope to extend an offer in November with a flexible start date later that month.

We encourage applicants from all backgrounds to apply for a job where you can do the best work of your career. We appreciate you giving us your consideration, and we promise to give you our full attention in return. We look forward to hearing from you!