Engineering Manager

About Factor House

We’re helping developers wrangle real-time data streams with clarity, control and none of the fluff. Our tools are built by engineers, for engineers, making stream processing easier to manage and scale. Today, we offer Kpow and Flex, two powerful products that simplify Kafka and Flink for teams at companies like Hewlett Packard, Airwallex, NORD/LB, Block and a bunch of Fortune 500s.

Factor House started in Melbourne in 2019, born out of a need for more pragmatic, developer-first tooling. Since then, we’ve quietly grown our global customer base by word of mouth and recently raised a $5M seed round led by Blackbird and OIF to kick things up a notch.

We’re focused on building thoughtful products for developers and delighting our customers along the way.

About the Role

We're looking for a hands on Engineering Manager to join our team at Factor House and help deliver the platform that’s transforming data streaming for some of the best data teams in the world. As an Engineering Manager at Factor House, you'll act as a player-coach, getting your hands dirty coding in Clojure while drawing on your domain experience in the data streaming space including Kafka and Flink to manage and lead the engineers on the product team. You’ll facilitate delivery of work and partner with your Product Manager to ship features that solve real customer challenges.

What you’ll be doing

• Collaborating closely with your team to shape new features or improvements that tackle real problems for Factor House customers

• Growing, empowering, and mentoring engineers on the team, supporting their personal and career growth through 1:1s, feedback and development plans

• Helping shape and improve how we plan, test, and roll out releases

• Iteratively identifying and driving improvements in team processes, dynamics, or tools to boost health, psychological safety, and delivery velocity

• Getting your hands dirty by designing and building features that balance speed and quality. Shipping fast matters, but it still needs to solve the problem.

• Collaborating with your Product Manager to define upcoming work, plan sprints, and align the team around goals, vision, and strategy.

• Taking ownership of key parts of our stack. Maintaining what’s already there while exploring smarter, cleaner, or more scalable ways to solve new challenges

• Participating in Engineering leadership discussions, contributing insights that impact the broader organization beyond your team

• Giving clear, thoughtful feedback on pull requests or taking the time to respond to feedback on your own code

• Aligning with cross-functional teams at Factor House to achieve strategic outcomes, resolving dependencies and fostering collaboration

• Jumping on calls with customers to understand their pain points and making their problems your own, so you can design thoughtful solutions that delight data teams

• Solving diverse problems in a hybrid environment, from technical debt to team conflicts, while promoting a positive culture

• Influencing product and design decisions about our products

• Evaluating tradeoffs, prioritizing initiatives, listening to input, unblocking team members, making decisive calls and ensuring everyone has fun along the way

• Pairing with other engineers to work through complex problems, sharing your knowledge across the stack

Who we’re looking for

• Deep technical understanding of Clojure or other JVM languages

• Understanding of data streaming technologies, ideally Apache Kafka and Apache Flink

• Strong technical skills in software engineering, with experience in the data streaming domain

• Excellent communication and collaboration abilities

• Ability to break down complex problems and deliver high-quality work

• A continuous improvement and growth mindset

• Previous experience in a senior IC role, with some exposure to mentoring or leading small teams

• Skills in coaching, diplomacy, servant leadership and facilitation

• Experience delivering large software projects in environments valuing quality, reliability, and engineering standard

• Excellent attention to detail, organizational, and time management skills. As a growing company, Factor House can be hectic at times!

• You share and are passionate about our values, and will ensure they guide your actions and behaviors

• Small team, big impact

• Generous, transparent compensation & equity

• Tech allowances

• Training budget

• Hybrid working for Melbourne-based employees (Located on Timeout's coolest street in the world)

• Up to 10 weeks of parental leave for the primary carer

• Regular team events and offsites to stay connected and have fun

Chat with our People Experience Manager

Get to know the team, our culture, and what it’s like to work at Factor House.

Technical Team Interview

Show us how you think, solve problems, and collaborate with others. This may be tinkering with some code, solving a real life problem or showing us your slide deck skills with a presentation.

Systems Design Interview

We'll work together on a collaborative exercise where you can talk us through a system from your past work where you played a key role in design or architecture and delivery.

Founder Interview

Get to know Factor House’s story from where it all began. Learn about our mission, vision and what drives us.

Outcome

We’ll let you know either way, whether it’s an offer or not this time. You’ll hear from us with care and transparency.