Vice President of Engineering

VICE PRESIDENT OF ENGINEERING

Ya rdstik is a start-up software company with a mission of building trust and safety into the Internet Economy. The world of background screening, certification, and training has lacked innovation and we're here to change that for our customers. Our enterprise-class technology allows us to provide a right-fit solution for our customers realistic for any platform, in any industry. Join us in our efforts to protect organizations and their people.

Yardstik is adding a Vice President of Engineering to our team. We pride ourselves on creating a seamless experience for our customers so we'll be looking to you to help shape and lead our product delivery teams and engineers in creating our SaaS products. You will collaborate across the Product & Engineering org to ensure that product goals are understood, developed and ultimately delivering the best-of-class APIs and User Interfaces to customers.

You're the right candidate if you're a forward-thinking leader and technologist with the ability to lead engineers, inspire to solve the problems of today, and maintain a plan and focus on our future roadmap. You are an out-of-the-box thinker who is intellectually curious and possesses strong leadership and management skills. You are an entrepreneurial, high-focused individual who can efficiently function in a high-demand, performance-driven environment with a growth mindset. You want to hit the ground running, produce results, and avoid being slowed by ambiguity. If this sounds like you, please read on.

This is a unique opportunity to join the company at an early stage. We are a values-driven company and our focus on culture has already proven itself many times over. We are honored to have recently been named as a Best Place to Work and have also received Minne Inno's Fire Award in the "Growing" category. Come be part of our amazing culture and join an environment where you can see and feel the impact of your work every day.

Our office is located in Bloomington, MN. We are seeking a local candidate for this role and offer a hybrid working model. This role is not eligible for visa sponsorship.

Essential Accountabilities:

• Lead, Manage, Accountability (LMA)
• Engineering Process
• Project Management and Release Process
• API Architecture
• Development Process
• Cybersecurity/Information Security Operations

What You Will Do in the Vice President of Engineering Role:

• Collaborate on product strategy. Partnering with stakeholders across the organization you will help to define and prioritize our roadmap.
• Gather requirements & create solutions. You'll be working to understand client/market needs, and work to distill complex problems into accessible, actionable, and accurate solutions.
• Define and implement agile frameworks while enhancing existing agile processes for scalability.
• Develop design architecture and documentation for planned implementations and changes.
• Direct department activities to design new products, modify existing designs, improve production techniques, and develop test procedures.
• Lead a team of dynamic software developers to build and maintain core frameworks that support application development in a SaaS environment. Provide coaching, mentoring, and support to the direct report staff in both technical and non-technical issues. Ensure high productivity of the team members.
• Prioritize, optimize & support releases. You'll work to balance speed vs. feature set trade-offs in real-time, and ultimately ensure our final products deliver on key external and internal requirements.
• Assist teams in integration configuration and testing alongside the client and supporting vendors.
• Responsible for planning, scoping, designing, and implementing custom integrations and new customer implementations.
• Communicate the highly technical subject matter in a clear and concise manner to diverse audiences.
• Facilitate knowledge transfer and educate clients on developing and operating interfaces to and from a SaaS platform.
• Keep feature stakeholders updated throughout the development cycle. Provide liaison with relevant parties, including product management, QA, other development teams, production, product support, etc., to facilitate the release process. Manage development-related customer escalation when needed.
• Analyze technology trends, human resource needs, and market demand to plan projects.
• Maintain a working knowledge of new technologies which may improve operations and develop recommendations accordingly.
• In partnership with key team members, direct our information security activities.
• Develop and implement continuous improvement opportunities for quality and productivity growth.
• Lead the vision for security including analysis tools, threat modeling, execution of penetration tests, and risk assessments.

Experience and Qualities for Success in the VP of Engineering Role:

• 8+ years of experience in strategizing and solutioning the enablement of SaaS platform including integrations.
• Domain expertise in human security, web application operations and SaaS cloud services is a plus.
• Experience directly speaking to and working with customers directly - great communication skills converting complex engineering topics to simple business/requirements terms.
• Successful startup experience and/or scaling a business is strongly desired.
• Experience developing partnerships with third-party companies.
• Extensive technical background covering data exchange integration using technologies such as REST APIs.
• Proven performance using agile methodologies; ability to work with a growing engineering team of 5-25 engineers.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-moving environment, where the need to both regularly (re)prioritize incremental releases, yet simultaneously focus on larger epics is key.
• Deep customer obsession, and DNA-level drive to ensure we build the products & features our customers actually need, will pay for, and will use to successfully drive business outcomes.
• Deeply collaborative & consensus driven; ability to drive alignment & requirements to satisfy a range of external & internal clients/stakeholders.
• Familiarity with our tech: Ruby on Rails, Typescript, React, API's, Cloud Native Hosting
• Knowledge of SOC, ISO and PBSA compliance.
• Familiarity of EOS is a bonus.

Equal Employment Opportunity

We're proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome our employee's differences, regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or Veteran status. Difference makes us better. Join us.