Senior Engineering Manager - Sanity Studio

Sanity

Saas

51-200

San Francisco, CA, USA

About the job

Overview:

We're looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to lead and grow a software engineering team responsible for the Sanity Studio. The Sanity Studio is a real-time, collaborative, composable, and highly configurable platform that gives editors an incredible amount of flexibility and gives developers a robust, extendable, and reactive framework for building modern authoring experiences.
Who are we?
Sanity.io is a modern, flexible content platform that replaces rigid legacy content management systems so companies like PUMA, Spotify, Figma, Riot Games, AT&T, and Skims can create amazing digital experiences for their customers.
One of our big differentiators is treating content as data so it can be stored in a single source of truth but seamlessly adapted and personalized for any channel without extra effort. Forward-thinking companies choose Sanity because they can create tailored content authoring experiences, customized workflows, and content models that reflect their business.
Backed by Netlify, Vercel, the founders of Twitter and Medium, Heroku’s ex-CEO, and leading VCs like ICONIQ Growth, Threshold Ventures, and Lead Edge Capital, Sanity is at the epicenter of the modern digital product development stack.
You can only build a great company with a great culture. Read about our values and join us in building a diverse and inclusive team.
About the Role
As a senior engineering management leader, you’ll be responsible for building a strong, engaged team and delivering outstanding experiences for developers and editors to build, collaborate, and coordinate on the authoring of modern content experiences.
Leading an engineering team at Sanity is about working with the team's product manager and designer to own the strategy, roadmap, and execution. This is achieved by working with great people and creating an environment where your team can shine. You'll have a passion for supporting your team's development and empowering them to consistently hit their goals and deliver results.
You’ll also be joining a growing group of talented engineering managers working together to shape the culture of our Engineering organization and build practices to help Sanity develop a reliable, scalable, and intuitive platform for our customers and community.
You and your team will be:

Building APIs: planning and implementing beautiful, minimal APIs that allow both internal and external developers to think about the high-level things they want to solve and leave the hard implementation details to us.
Thinking about collaboration: Everything in Sanity reacts in real-time to changes in content. Every edit sends structured patches to the server and is applied to connected clients. Presence indicators show who’s editing what. This means APIs need to be reactive - “fetch and subscribe” rather than “fetch and return”.
Debugging and optimizing: With a huge React-based app full of reactivity, there are a lot of updates and room for optimization. Keeping an eye on performance, figuring out the slowest paths and building good patterns to keep the user interface snappy is important.
Learning and teaching: With a huge community of content editors and developers using the product, you’ll have lots of opportunities to learn from what they are doing with Sanity and how we can make their lives easier. It also means there are opportunities to teach developers internally and externally about best practices and new approaches.
Continuously improving: There is always room for improvement. We want to improve our test coverage, make our APIs more robust, decouple state from UI, stay up to date with the latest dependencies… In other words: always improving the product.
Building in the open: The Sanity studio is an open-source project. The vast majority of your team’s contributions will be public and MIT-licensed.

This also means you and your team will:

NOT create “webpages”. Sanity is a complex, React-powered application. We’re looking for someone who has experience with web applications - things that run in your browser, have local state, updates in reaction to remote changes etc. It has a lifecycle much longer than a regular webpage render cycle, e.g. receive HTML, attach event handlers and done.
NOT be working on an internal tool that no one outside of your company will see. Sanity has a large number of customers and users which will all be using and building on our code, and our APIs. As a developer at Sanity you will be delivering high-impact work that empowers a huge community of people all over the world.
NOT be stagnant. There will be plenty of opportunity to explore new patterns, investigate relevant tools and keep up to date with the latest and greatest. It’s important for us to stay ahead!

In this role, we’re seeking

A compassionate, friendly human being who cares about and shows respect to the people you work with and has empathy for our users. We want everyone to feel welcome in our community while using our product, regardless of who they are and what they already know.
Someone pragmatic. While we strive to make the best possible solutions, we also need to get value to our users and make sure they are not blocked. This means that sometimes your team will need to deliver an incomplete or imperfect solution which we can iterate.
Someone who sets the standard for the team to ensure consistent, sustainable delivery and manage expectations and visibility of work.
Someone who will work closely with the Head of Engineering to build a strong engineering organization, facilitate teamwork, and establish an Engineering culture that can grow with us.

This may be you

3+ years of engineering leadership experience, and/including 5+ years experience working as a software engineer/developer.
Experience with React, state management, core web and browser concepts, module systems and building, TypeScript. A bonus is experience with automated browser testing and Node.js.
Experience working at a product/SaaS company as a senior software engineering manager or engineer.
Experience working closely with product managers and designers to deliver demanding user interfaces for technical and non-technical users.
Ability to understand the complex requirements of building not just a user-facing application but also a toolkit that our customers, in turn, use to build their user interfaces.
Experience working with remote teams
Able to clearly and concisely communicate technical designs and thinking verbally and in writing.
Ability and desire to start work in the morning on the early side (6 AM or 7 AM PT), given our overlap with team members in Europe. This also means ending work early!
Startup experience is an asset.

What we offer

Location: San Francisco / Bay Area
The ability to work flexibly from home or in a fun office environment in the SF Financial District not far from the Ferry Building.
A highly skilled, inspiring, and supportive team where long-term personal growth is encouraged and supported.
Positive, flexible, and trust-based work environment.
A very global, multi-culturally diverse group of colleagues and customers.
Comprehensive health plans and perks.
A healthy work-life balance that accommodates individual and family needs.