Head of Developer User Experience

In 1940, German submarines sank more than twelve hundred British ships. Without regular shipments of food, the British Isles would starve. They needed a new strategy.

Surprisingly, the strategy didn't come from the sailors engaged in the day-to-day of combat with German U-boats—it came from eight women from the Women's Royal Navy Service. With the help of former ship captain Gilbert Roberts, who trained them on the practical capabilities of the ships and submarines, they ran wargames that revealed the British seriously misunderstood German tactics: they had assumed the U-boats would attack from outside the shipping convoy; in actuality they waited for the convoy to pass over them, and attacked from the stern.

The women—nicknamed the Wrens—developed new strategies for fighting the submarines, overcoming skepticism when 18-year old Janet Okell five times defeated a British admiral in submarine wargames. The tactics they developed were extremely successful, and they trained over 5,000 officers throughout the course of the war.

Their success highlights how technique and training can enable those in the field to have an outsized impact. At Mercury, several teams fill the role of enablers, via education, tooling, and frameworks that support those building the product. Mercury is hiring a Head of Developer User Experience (DUX) to manage two of these teams, backend and frontend developer user experience. Both teams currently work on the following:

• Training new engineers
• Improving testing and tooling for our codebases
• Rounding out sharp edges that degrade developers' quality of life

The frontend developer user experience team also:

• Builds our Design System, creating a palette of reusable components in conjunction with design
• Works to stabilize frontend builds

The backend developer user experience team also works to improve foundational Haskell tools, like the GHC compiler.

In this role you will:

• Manage the managers of our frontend and backend developer user experience teams, providing guidance on roadmap planning and people management
• Build a deep understanding of the work performed by those teams, down to the level of discussing what topics should be part of our curriculum, or advising on prioritization between disparate frontend tasks
• Build a strategy for developing our new engineer training programs into an ongoing education program that spans the lifetime of engineers at the company
• Communicate with the rest of our engineering team, in order to better prioritize work for your teams, and communicate the benefits your teams provide
• Enable collaboration between our frontend and backend developer user experience teams, to support the product engineers' whose work spans our stack.

You should:

• Have a solid understanding of web development
• Have worked as an engineering manager or in some sort of leadership capacity before
• Have ideas about how to best educate engineers
• Have a working knowledge of Haskell, or be very eager to learn it
  
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