Engineering Manager, Events

About Hightouch

Hightouch’s mission is to empower everyone to take action on their data.  We’ve pioneered the Composable Customer Data Platform (CDP), which helps companies use their own data warehouse to collect, prepare, and activate customer data for marketing personalization and business operations. Traditionally, acting on data has required engineering time and bandwidth, and left most business users stuck with charts and reports that are unable to take automated action on their data. With Hightouch, every business user, without writing any code, can activate data to streamline critical processes, improve marketing performance, and scale operations.

Our team operates with a focus on making a meaningful impact for our customers. We believe in approaching challenges with a first-principles thinking mindset, moving quickly and embracing our value of efficient execution, and treating each other with compassion and kindness. We look for team members who are strong communicators, have a growth mindset, and are motivated and persistent in achieving our goals.

Hundreds of companies use Hightouch, including PetSmart, Warner Music Group, Spotify, Ramp, Retool, Plaid, and L’Oreal. We’re based in San Francisco and are remote-friendly. Hightouch is backed by leading investors such as Amplify Partners, ICONIQ Growth, Bain Capital Ventures, Y-Combinator, and Afore Capital.

About the Role

We are looking for an engineering manager to lead our event collection and identity resolution services. This is an opportunity to take services that are already processing large volumes of data, and push them into the realm of millions of requests per second. There will be many opportunities to solve hard problems in distributed systems, performance optimization, and architecture. We need someone who thrives when pushing the boundaries of what is possible. 

You would lead a team of best in class engineers. We believe in enabling our engineers to do their best work for our customers by giving them extremely high levels of ownership and autonomy. You would help by leading by example, continuing to raise our already high technical bar, and making thoughtful judgement calls.

Some of the problems we’ll be working on include:

• Reliably Streaming Events at Low Latency: We need to continue to scale our event product’s capabilities, while maintaining reliability and reducing the end to end latency of event processing. We also need to work with other teams who will be processing these events live to deliver new features.
• Improving Algorithms and Data Structures for Identity Resolution: Our identity resolution product needs to be able to process billions of rows efficiently. We’ll also be expanding the capabilities of this product, so careful work on the underlying algorithms will be required.
• Feature Development: We have a backlog of features we know customers want and we’d love to add to our products. This is an opportunity to stay close to customers and work with product and design, while doing deep distributed systems work.

About You

We are looking for people who are hungry, motivated by high ownership, hard problems, and who have a strong track record of driving impact in multiple environments. This is a leadership role, but we care about evidence of impact and potential for growth more than years of experience. 

You are a great fit if you:

• Value excellence in what you do, and bring out excellence in those around you.
• Are adept at making pragmatic judgements about how to move forward in a messy, fast-moving, real world scenario.
• Have strong opinions about what the right architecture is for a given distributed systems problem
• Reason from first principles about problems, and take feedback well to adjust your solutions
• Owned systems that have undergone orders of magnitude of growth and helped them scale accordingly
• [Even Better] You’ve built or scaled event/data streaming engines that process and move terabytes of data per day in a scalable way

What We Offer

True technical ownership with room to run. You’ll shape huge parts of our core systems and culture. We are growing extremely fast, and your ability to grow and work on harder and harder problems will be limited by only how far you want to go.

The salary range for this position is $220,000 - $280,000K USD per year, which is location independent in accordance with our remote-first policy. We also offer meaningful equity compensation in the form of ISO options, and offer early exercise and a 10 year post-termination exercise window.

Interview Process

We believe interviews should test how you drive real impact in ambiguous situations, not whether you know the solution to a specific algorithmic puzzle. Expect to do a lot of first principles thinking and no coding challenges. The interview order may change but our panel is generally as follows:

• Recruiter Screen [30m]: Chat with our recruiting team to get to know each other and see if the role could be a good mutual fit.
• Leadership and Management [60m]: Meet with the hiring manager to discuss how you lead.
• System Design Interview [90m]: Work with an engineer to architect a system at a conceptual level. You’ll start from customer requirements and work all the way down to specific technical implementation.
• Execution and Impact [90m]: Talk with the hiring manager to assess how you drive impact, prioritize, and maintain technical excellence. Expect to discuss past projects.
• Sync Engine Speed Analysis  [60m]: Work with the VP of Engineering to see how you measure and analyze the performance of a real system.