Engineering Manager, Woebot Labs
Salary not provided
AWS
GCP
Node.js
Senior and Expert level
Remote in US
Digital therapeutics for mental health
Job no longer available
Digital therapeutics for mental health
101-200 employees
B2CMental healthSaaSMobileWellbeingMedTech
Job no longer available
Salary not provided
AWS
GCP
Node.js
Senior and Expert level
Remote in US
101-200 employees
B2CMental healthSaaSMobileWellbeingMedTech
Company mission
Woebot's mission is to create new ways to deliver mental health care, so people can access effective support at any moment.
Role
Who you are
- For you to be successful in this role, you’ll have spent a good portion of your career working as an individual contributor, preferably in backend teams and are as a result highly technically skilled
- While it would be great if you’ve already been a people manager at some point in your career, we are willing to talk to candidates who may be less experienced in this area
- This is an exciting time for the company. If you have a proven track record of shipping high quality features whilst working in agile teams with empathy, then this might be your next career move!
- 8+ years of software engineering experience with at least 1 year as an engineering manager. Ideally, you will have worked for the majority of your career with consumer facing digital products
- Technical expertise
- You are an expert in the building of backend solutions, preferably Node.js
- You are highly familiar with cloud platform services, particularly AWS and GCP
- You have extensive experience of building and using CI/CD pipelines
- You are an advocate for the use of automated testing frameworks
- You are familiar with the Serverless framework
- People and project managerial expertise
- You are an excellent communicator
- You are enthusiastic about the training, motivating, and coaching of software engineers in your charge
- You are potentially new to people management - holding 1:1s, managing performance reviews, career development/coaching, motivation and conflict resolution. If you have gaps here, we will help you to fill them
- You are highly familiar with the Agile/Scrum project management methodology
What the job involves
- You will be the Engineering Manager for one of the Therapeutic Product Group pods
- The Therapeutic Product Group is a cross-disciplinary team made up of engineers, PMs, content writers and data analysts, whose role is to ship features that improve the clinical efficacy of the platform
- Your primary responsibility will be to manage the engineers working within this pod and to deliver technical leadership for the pod
- Your team of experienced engineers is distributed across the US and Europe. Your team knows the platform well and are highly familiar with our workflow and with getting features and products built efficiently and to specification
- You’ll be reporting directly to our VP of Engineering, Frank Lynam from whom you will also be inheriting this role
- You actually get to interview with Frank so you’ll get to learn firsthand what it entails
- You’ll also need to be an accomplished project manager and you will need to act as the people manager for your team
- While we don't expect you to master our platform, which is built on Node.js right away, you'll have ample resources to help you learn and get there, including your team, product colleagues, and other engineering leaders
- Within 1 month you will:
- Familiarize yourself with the Woebot SDLC and documentation workflows
- Learn how to successfully roll out a platform component release
- Immerse yourself in our knowledge base and proactively ask questions to bridge gaps in your understanding
- Have written and merged a couple of small PRs
- Have gained a deeper understanding of what motivates your team and discovered what drives your team's success
- Have set up weekly 1:1s with your direct reports and have started to get to know them
- Have started to developed a strong working relationship with your product manager
- Have met with the content writers, QEs and data analysts that you will be working with on a day to day basis
- Within 3 months you will:
- Be working on a daily basis with your product manager
- Be the primary PoC for your team for all inbound technical queries
- Be agile and able to react to changes in requirements as they happen
- Know a lot more about how the platform components work together and individually
- Offer data driven suggestions to engineering leadership on how to improve our SDLC process
- Review all technical documentation produced by your team
- Within 6 months you will:
- Be leading your team to produce two high quality features per quarter, each of which improves Woebot’s clinical potency
- Be leading a team that feels psychologically safe and content while being productive
- Be contributing to the writing of feature solution documentation based on product requirements. Even if you’re not writing the specs yourself, you need to be familiar with everything being worked on by the team
- Be a promoter of best practices across the engineering workflow spectrum, e.g. secure coding practices, experimentation, release strategy etc
- Have identified the strengths of your team and where it needs to be supplemented and are already translating this into actionable items including the sourcing of new team members
- Within Year 1 you will:
- Have made our feature creation and deployment workflow simpler and more efficient
- Have added a number of clinical efficacy features that are tested by internal product studies
- Have an onboarding programme that sees new senior engineers able to lead feature developments within 3 months of coming on board
- Be data driven and be able to report objectively on your team’s meeting of company objectives
- Key Responsibilities
- You are the engineering manager for a Therapeutic Product Group pod tasked with improving the potency of Woebot
- You are the people manager for the engineers in this pod. You ensure that your team is happy and productive in their work
- You collaborate on a daily basis with your product manager who is based on the West Coast of the US
- You ensure features are built on time and to specification by your team
- You collaborate with the content writers, data analysts, security, data privacy reps and QEs working within the same scrum team
- You use parallel SDLC processes to cater for projects of different risk profiles
- You work with your partners in engineering leadership on inter-team objectives
Otta's take
Xav Kearney
CTO of Otta
With the mental health crisis only exacerbated by the events of recent years, and clinical care struggling to work through the backlog, many US citizens are not receiving the critical care they need to manage their mental health. Woebot is a tech startup looking to address this issue, with an AI chatbot designed to provide 24/7 front-line mental health support to its users.
The company has received plenty of column inches and strong financial backing. Importantly, however, it is getting the clinical thumbs up too: Woebot received the FDA’s breakthrough device designation for its use in post partum depression cases. This step has only been completed by other apps for separate mental health issues such as Vorvida for problem drinking and Pear Therapeutics for opioid abuse.
The use of digital therapeutics is expected to begin gaining real momentum over coming years, as the need for clinical support increases and the complexity and efficacy of mental healthtech develops. Funding has, consequently, spiked for healthcare bots, and Woebot has been a major beneficiary, but if the market proves as hot as anticipated, it may have to watch its back against smaller competitors like Wysa, Youper, and X2.
Insights
Led by a woman
Top investors
19% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Mar 2022
$9.5m
LATE VC
Jul 2021
$90m
SERIES B
Total funding: $123.3m
Company benefits
- Health and wellness - Competitive health packages to keep you healthy and happy. We provide healthcare, dental and optical both to you and your dependents
- Flexible time off - We work hard but also believe that taking time off from work is essential, both personally and professionally. We offer a flexible policy that allows you to take the time you need when you feel it’s appropriate
- Learning and development - We set aside a yearly stipend to support your learning interests — whether it’s coding, writing or attending conferences – we are committed to investing in your professional growth and success
- Parental leave - We want Woebot Health to be a place for all kinds of families. We offer generous parental leave for both parents for birth and adoption
- Snacks, at home - Every month you can choose your NatureBox snacks for home delivery. There’s Peanut Butter Maca Cookies, Turmeric Black Pepper Popcorn, Shortbread Cookies, Honey Dijon Pretzels, Dried Mangos…ok, stop. We’re hungry
Company values
- Empathic - You’re a compassionate person and a team player motivated to understand others and help them be successful, too. You care as deeply for your colleagues as you do for our mission and our users
- Growth mindset - You believe abilities – like intelligence and talent – can be developed through dedication and hard work. You see failure as an opportunity to grow and welcome feedback as a pathway to your continued success
- Humble - You recognize that you are one among many, and you hold a genuine desire to discover what other people can offer. You are intrigued by how others think, and how others feel differently from you. You lean into these moments with patience and curiosity
- Self-aware - You possess a high level of emotional intelligence, which allows you to understand yourself and others, and to have a healthy emotional life in the workplace
- Proactive and flexible - You are able to hit the ground running, you take responsibility for finding a way to get the job done. You learn as quickly as possible and sometimes do things outside the immediate scope of your work, giving it all you’ve got
- Strong work ethic - You’ve mastered healthy habits in your life that allow you to do great things. You exemplify dedication and commitment to coming up with very good results in your work and inspire others to do the same
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Founders
Alison Darcy
(Founder & President)A Psychologist and healthcare designer with over 20 years experience building health tech. Gained her PhD at Stanford University School of Medicine, before working as a Senior Investigator and returning to Stanford as an Instructor.
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