Software Engineering Manager

We're looking for a Software Engineering Manager (hybrid, Bristol, full-time) to join our talented team and help democratise the world of finance.

Company Description

Tumelo’s mission is to empower shareholder democracy with technology that supports impactful stewardship. Since our inception in 2018, we've developed state-of-the-art investor-voting technologies. Our pass-through voting technology allows institutional and retail investors in pooled funds to vote their shares, providing greater choice and optionality. We aim to create a more transparent and representative stewardship process, leading to better outcomes for investors and the industry. For more information about our voting solutions, visit tumelo.com.

The Team

Tumelo is committed to building an inclusive, diverse and equitable culture based on the principles of high trust, autonomy, empowerment and psychological safety. We take inspiration from our company values - daring, nimble, mission driven, empowered and supportive. We all strive to represent these values in the way we work with our colleagues and external stakeholders alike.

The engineering team is comprised of four squads. The squads are laser focused on building, enhancing, and scaling the ProxySphere product - our industry leading pass-through voting SaaS product, currently serving some of the largest investment firms in the world.

As an engineering function, we’re deeply committed to the principles of DevOps, keeping engineers close to the things they build and release. This investment in automation enables the engineering team to safely release code multiple times per day.

We work in a strongly collaborative culture and actively encourage the engineering team to share ideas, pair and collaborate.

In short, if you’d like to be part of a team with a progressive culture and modern engineering practices, this could be the role for you.

Role Description

This is an exciting opportunity to lead a team of between 4-6 full stack engineers, working on Tumelo’s pioneering Retail and Institutional voting platforms. The team is also supported by a designer and product manager, and the team collaborate closely to achieve the best outcomes with a strong customer focus.

This team has a diverse range of responsibilities, including:

• The user-facing platforms of Tumelo’s offering: onboarding of users, determining their investments, offering voting capabilities, and reporting vote results after AGM dates.

• End-to-end ownership of a collection of Golang-based services, including:
• - Designing, building & testing in Golang with a Postgres database.
• - Deployment to AWS EKS using Skaffold via GitlabCI pipelines.
• - Infrastructure deployment via Terraform.
• - Observability via AWS Cloudwatch, and x-ray.
• - User-facing Next.js frontends written in Typescript React.

• In addition, we are currently embarking on an exciting project to modernise some of our legacy services in a new stack, and we’re looking for someone with experience of working at an industry-leading pace to help the team increase velocity through improvements to architecture and tooling as part of this work.

We have a culture of openness, support, and giving feedback. We spend a day each month learning new things as an engineering function to ensure we maintain our skills and can leverage new ideas.

To be a good fit for this role, you must be able to:

• Provide technical direction and leadership, facilitating collaborative decision-making on architecture, frameworks, and tools, and guiding the team to make informed and effective choices.

• Provide clear, compassionate, and actionable feedback through regular one-on-one meetings.

• Actively sponsor team members by recognising their achievements, advocating for their growth, and creating opportunities to help them achieve their goals

• Ensure code quality through rigorous code reviews and adherence to best practices.

• Work with product managers and designers to evaluate technical blockers early and translate business requirements into technical specifications.

• Facilitate goal setting, planning and estimation, monitor progress, and proactively escalate risks to stakeholders.

• This is primarily a hands-off role, but we find it helps to write code from time-to-time to understand the developer experience of engineers on the team. We support people to find the right balance for them.

If you have any of the following, we'd be especially interested to hear from you. We recognise that there is an abundance of technologies, and nobody can have experience with them all, so if your experience looks different from what we’ve identified below, and you think you can excel in the role, we’d still love to learn more about you.

• A great understanding of software engineering principles that you use to guide you in building scalable, efficient and maintainable code.

• Ability to plan, prioritise, and manage multiple projects simultaneously.

• Experience of system and architectural design and improvement, maintaining a high-quality codebase alongside sustainable and maintainable architectural patterns.

• Strong critical thinking skills and the ability to develop innovative solutions.

• Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to convey technical concepts clearly.

• Ability to effectively communicate with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Demonstrates strong leadership skills with the ability to mentor and guide team members with previous experience managing direct reports and being involved with performance reviews and career development.

• Experience in delegating tasks, managing workloads, and providing constructive feedback.

• Ability to adapt to changing technologies and stay current with industry trends.

• Experience in driving change and improving processes within a team or organisation.

• Experience writing testable code in a strongly typed language, in a commercial setting, using an automation-first approach (CI/CD).

• Frontend experience, ideally with React and TypeScript.

• Experience in the deployment and management of containerised services, preferably using Kubernetes.

• Experience working with a variety of databases (SQL, NoSQL and/or GraphDBs) and the ability to optimise queries.

• Understanding of DevOps, IaC, Terraform, Skaffold, and AWS.

• Previous experience in a scale-up environment where prioritisation and working to hit your goals is strongly encouraged.

• Experience of working in cross-functional agile teams.

• A solid understanding of the fundamentals of computer science.

What we offer

We’re incredibly passionate about Tumelo’s culture and ways of working. We have an amazing team who care deeply about our mission. We value team well-being and strive to build a safe, healthy environment where people can bring their whole selves to work. 

• Salary £78k - £93.5k dependent on experience. 
• Generous company share scheme
• We are all owners of Tumelo and beneficiaries of our collective success. 
• Private health insurance
• Via Equipsme & AXA, including 24/7 private GP access, dental, optical, and mental health support. 
• Great Maternity & Paternity policies
• We recognise how important maternity/paternity leave is to the wellbeing of our team. For maternity leave, Tumelo offers the first 26 weeks at 100% pay, followed by Standard Maternity Pay thereafter. For paternity leave, Tumelo offers six weeks at 100% pay.
• Work From Home budget 
• To get you everything you need to be able to work comfortably from home. 
• 5% employer pension contribution 
• £50 per month wellness budget
• Pick the benefit that works for you, whether that’s a monthly gym membership, a regular massage, career coaching or a regular delivery of healthy food. There are over 1000 things to choose from! 
• 33 days holiday
• These include bank holidays, but you can take bank holidays off at your discretion, some of the team prefer to work those days and save the holiday for another time, and that’s fine by us! You’ll also get an extra holiday day when you’ve been with us for 3 years!
• Flexible hours
• We commit to being available to each other on slack/email between 10am and 3pm Monday – Friday (save for lunch), but outside of these hours you can work whenever you feel most productive.   
• Tumfests
• The team commit to gathering together for a full day at least once per month in Bristol or an off-site location. Travel costs are covered by the business.
• Hybrid working
• We encourage staff to come into the office at least two days per week, but we’re flexible and pragmatic about this.  

Working here, you’ll grow more than you would anywhere else. You will join a team who will appreciate you every day and your contributions will genuinely change our business’ future.

Recruitment Process

We operate a three-stage interview process:

• Stage one: Covering your thoughts on working culture, work history and some technical.
• Stage two: Technical task (completed in your own time) followed by a technical interview, initially focusing on the take-home task.
• Stage three: Meet our CEO Georgia.