Couchsurfing is the world’s premier social travel platform, with over 20 million members in nearly every country in the world. Couchsurfing changes people’s lives. Hearing the stories of Couchsurfers whose lives have been transformed by travel is the greatest reward for doing what we do. Join us and every day thousands of people from every country in the world will meet in person and embark on new adventures as a direct result of your work.

If you’re interesting in making a big impact at a small company with a huge and loyal user base, then you’ll probably like it here.  As we enter the next phase in the company's growth, we are looking for a VP of Engineering to lead the Engineering Team that spans across the US and Europe.

Are you passionate about building relationships, teams, and products? Does your track record include delivering exceptional product at high velocity while collaborating closely with product and business leaders to guide high-stakes decisions? Do you love to challenge yourself and others to accomplish enviable feats? Do you know rails, swift, kotlin, aws and scrum like the back of your hand?  If you answered yes to any of these questions, then we want to meet you!  

Responsibilities:

• Hire, develop, and mentor engineering team members including engineering managers, back-end, front-end, iOS and Android engineers, QA-ers, data engineers, scrum masters, and more.
• Drive feature velocity and throughput (co-owns delivery lifecycle with head of product) to an agreed quality standard.
• Routinely communicate expected outputs, timelines, and status of ongoing work to lead team.
• Provide inputs and maintain alignment with cross-functional peers with regards to business objectives, approach and timelines to achieve them.
• Continuously improve  engineering team morale and cultural alignment.
• Recommend and execute any required changes to team to obtain objective above.
• Contribute technical expertise to leadership team decisions (member of leadership team).

Required Experience and Skills:

• Demonstrated ability to recruit, train, and professionally develop high-performance delivery, operations, and security teams.
• Seniority in at least 5 of the following technical skill sets, with rails, javascript, one of iOS or Android, and Amazon Web Services required.  This also includes previous experience in negotiating feature complexity on those platforms with engineers and accurately forecasting feature delivery against engineering capabilities
  • Ruby on Rails*
  • Client-side Javascript (esp React and JQuery)*
  • iOS and/or Android*
  • Amazon Web Services*
  • Security, privacy, and compliance
  • Data engineering & advanced analytics
  • Machine learning
• Mastery of modern devops lifecycle and tools - demonstrated ability to produce high velocity and quality through automation, testing, workflow optimization, and other ways of enhancing team productivity.
• A love and demonstrated history of shipping high-quality product on time and budget.
• Strong affinity for CS’s mission and impact.
• Ability to manage remote staff.

Preferred Experience:

• Containers and Kubernetes

A bit about our stack

• Infrastructure: AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes

• Backend: Ruby on Rails

• Frontend: Javascript, ES6, SASS

• Data: MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, Redshift

• Management: JIRA, Confluence, Slack,

• Testing: Cucumber, RSpec

• Operational Visibility: EFK, Grafana, Prometheus

Culture and Perks:

• Awesome co-workers who care about building a great service and each other

• Best in-class tools for developing software and communicating with the team

• We work hard and play hard - you have freedom to get the job done, but must deliver results

• Business trips to the San Francisco Headquarters for product planning and teambuilding

• Unlimited paid time off

• Health insurance

• Gym benefits

• Lunch stipend

Compensation:

• Salary:  $160k - $200k

• Equity:  0.75% - 2%