Engineering Manager, Asynchronous Services

Lead the team building Slack's asynchronous compute infrastructure.

Slack enables people all over the world to communicate and collaborate together. Teams of all scales — from the world’s largest public companies to the smallest of startups — use Slack to get work done, so we take performance and reliability very seriously.

For millions of people, Slack is the primary communication tool they use at work, and now at home, all day long. They expect it to be exceptionally reliable and fast all the time.

What you will be doing

We are looking for an engineering manager to lead the Asynchronous Services team in our Infrastructure pillar. We use a job queue system for business logic that is too time-consuming to run in the context of a web request. This system is a critical component of our architecture, used for every Slack message post, push notification, URL unfurl, calendar reminder, and billing calculation. On our busiest days, the system processes over 6 billion jobs at a peak rate of 170,000 per second.

We need someone who can guide a cohesive, highly productive team through effective engineering processes and policies. You will set and fulfill the engineering hiring plan for the team, including sourcing, screening, and interviewing. You should understand the technical decisions made by your team and be able to articulate them to varied audiences. You will partner with Infrastructure Engineer, Backend Engineers, and Product Managers, and will be required to gather requirements, prioritize decisions and ensure timely execution. You focus on creating alignment and giving your team the necessary autonomy for them to execute rapidly. You understand the value of career development and can help propel the team forward by facilitating psychologically safe discussions around project progress, process improvements, mentorship, and general satisfaction.

We operate at tremendous scale with systems that process millions of events per second. We maintain and build all of asynchronous background job processing systems.

We have a strong commitment to quality and understand that simplicity and reliability should be primary aspects of the systems that we build. We are a diverse and inclusive team that treats our colleagues exceptionally well.

What you should have

You have a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field, or equivalent training, fellowship, or work experience.
You have 2+ years of Engineering Management experience building productive, high-functioning teams. You can describe why these teams were high-functioning and what you specifically did to ensure engineers felt productive.
You are a very strong verbal and nonverbal communicator. You are adept at explaining complex technical concepts and share your knowledge with diverse audiences.
You have mastered the art of requirements-gathering and keeping the team focused on the most important initiatives.
You can contemplate several—often conflicting—constraints and make rapid decisions.
You can anticipate future technical needs for the product and craft plans to realize them.
You excel at building roadmaps and can develop a long-term team vision in partnership with other stakeholders. You can then be accountable for driving project execution.
You love helping engineers develop new skills and advance in their careers. You don’t shy away from performance conversations and you recognize the relationship between objective feedback and career growth.

Slack has a positive, diverse, and supportive culture—we look for people who are curious, inventive, and work to be a little better every single day. In our work together we aim to be smart, humble, hardworking and, above all, collaborative. If this sounds like a good fit for you, why not say hello?

Slack is registered as an employer in many, but not all, states. If you are not located in or able to work from a state where Slack is registered, you will not be eligible for employment.

Slack is an Equal Opportunity Employer and participant in the U.S. Federal E-Verify program. Women, minorities, individuals with disabilities and protected veterans are encouraged to apply. Slack will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.