Manager, Software Engineering

Hi, We’re AppFolio.

Job Description

About AppFolio

We’re innovators, changemakers, and collaborators. We’re more than just a software company — we’re a cloud-based powerhouse that creates products to make our customers’ lives easier. We’re revolutionizing the way people do business, and we want your ideas, your enthusiasm, and your passion to help us keep on innovating. We listen to our customers, it’s in our DNA.

Most of our engineers in product development focus on our company’s customers and their needs. Some of us have internal customers as well: other engineers. This is one of those roles; you’d be joining an engineering group responsible for crafting a software deployment experience that your fellow AppFolio engineers will love.

About Our Group

The AppFolio Infrastructure and Deployment Platform engineering group helps product development teams with their infrastructure, service- design and architecture, and deployment needs, so that they can focus more on solving customer problems. We build and manage the primary platform deployment tooling for our product development teams, simplifying and stabilizing the deployment experience, and lead the way to continuous deployment for all our product components. We also provide guidance, mentoring, education, hands-on assistance for teams making systems-architecture decisions or creating new shared solutions / services, and extending systems with AWS platform services.

Our Mission

Our group is on a mission to enable us to get changes from source code committed to production deployment in under an hour. We use the industry standard of "Lead time to deploy" (LTTD) as the key metric. We want the engineer(s) who pushed the change into a main branch to know quickly if their code is defect free and performs well. Our instrumentation should clearly indicate if there’s a major problem, or if we can be confident to roll out the change to a growing subset of our customers immediately. We want that “90 minutes to confidence” for all our teams, including the teams that own their own services, as well as the many teams who work on the core application.

Your Mission

To lead the AppFolio Infrastructure and Deployment Platform engineering group in achieving its big fat audacious goal of enabling our organization to practice “90 minutes to confidence” and a LTTD of less than 1 hour on average, while continuing to provide ongoing support of their existing solutions and services. You’re responsible for fine-tuning and executing on our existing strategy towards the 1-hour LTTD goal, and for coaching, mentoring, and unblocking current team members, as well as recruiting, interviewing, and hiring new ones. This initiative will drive up our need for fast, reliable, and high quality engineering practices across the department, and eventually change the way not just all of Product Development delivers software to our customers, but into other departments (such as customer service) as well. You will not be at it alone. Aside from the experienced and talented engineers on the teams, you will partner with the 2 Software Architects in our group who have broad experience inside and outside AppFolio and are very hands-on with technology development. You will also have support from your Engineering Director for the organization-wide changes.

Your Responsibilities

• You drive execution by organizing teamwork, setting goals, and holding teams accountable while pushing for continuous improvement of team agility and practices
• You ensure that your team members have what they need to succeed, are empowered to act independently, and always know where to go for help if they’re blocked.
• You maintain a public backlog and roadmap for your teams and projects (using our standard platform teams’ tools), keeping a close pulse on our internal customers’ needs and how well our solutions are solving their problems.
• You ensure that anyone in APM engineering can easily inform themselves of your group’s plans, progress, recommended tools, practices, etc., and maintain an open dialog so anyone can feel part of solving platform-wide problems. You do this in a way that scales from 200 to 600 engineers, and still feels like there’s real people behind it.
• You make hard things easier for your team members by maintaining good relationships with APM engineering directors and other partners.
• You ensure that the team makes prudent system / component design decisions, balancing a long-term perspective with the need for immediate impact.
• You recruit, hire, train, coach and mentor engineers continuously and proactively, so that the team is resilient enough to be able to manage ongoing platform concerns it is responsible for, can work on transformative projects, and also respond to urgent needs.
• You lead the LTTD < 1 hour project by tracking your group’s objectives, priorities, tasks, and outcomes, as well as the related objectives this project will put on the roadmaps / backlogs of teams outside our group.
  
  

Education And Experience

• Strong technical/coding skills
• Has managed multiple teams (6+ people)
• Has worked in a Continuous Deployment environment
• Bonus points for anyone who has been part of creating Continuous Deployment capabilities for a large distributed web application
• Has hands on experience working on a platform or infrastructure team
• Good working knowledge of current technology trends
• Great verbal and written communicator
• Experience with Ruby on Rails a plus
• At least 8 years of experience working in industry
• At least 3 years of prior management experience
  
  

Compensation & Benefits

The base salary that we reasonably expect to pay for this role is: $170,000 to $230,000.

The actual base salary for this role will be determined by a variety of factors, including but not limited to: the candidate’s skills, education, experience, etc.

Please note that base pay is one important aspect of a compelling Total Rewards package. The base pay range indicated here does not include any additional benefits or bonuses/commissions that you may be eligible for based on your role and/or employment type.

Regular full-time employees are eligible for benefits including but not limited to:

• Paid Time Off (PTO)
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits
• Long-term and short-term disability insurance
• 401(k)
• Wellness benefits
  
  

Interns / full-time temporary / eligible variable hour employees are eligible for benefits including but not limited to:

• Medical
• 401(k)
• Wellness benefits
  
  

Our Story

AppFolio (NASDAQ: APPF) was founded in 2006 with the mission to revolutionize vertical industry businesses by providing great software and service. Our easy-to-use, cloud-based software helps our customers more effectively market, manage, and grow their businesses. Our software solutions exist in the real estate vertical, including AppFolio Property Manager and AppFolio Investment Management.

Why AppFolio

We ride and make waves together, with a relentless focus on building great products for the way our customers work and live today — and tomorrow. AppFolio is a destination organization where careers are made and accelerated. Here, innovation is a team sport.

Paddle as One.

Statement of Equal Opportunity

At AppFolio, we value diversity in backgrounds and perspectives and depend on it to drive our innovative culture. That’s why we’re a proud Equal Opportunity Employer, and we believe that our products, our teams, and our business are stronger because of it. This means that no matter what race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identification, national origin, age, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, or veteran status, you’re always welcome at AppFolio.