IC5 profile: Enablement Org

See also internal profile

Business need

The Enablement org’s main goal is to reduce complexity and improve development velocity and time to market by providing self-service solutions, engineering standards, and best practices. The team aims to enable developers to focus on business logic and puts an emphasis on developer experience and product quality.

The teams in the enablement org have very clear items that they need to focus on in their roadmaps to meet the above goal, however, there are many other high impact challenges that remain on hold either through lack of capacity or unclear ownership.

To ensure these important challenges are not ignored or forgotten we have identified the need for an IC5 engineer to lead the effort on identifying and tackling challenges like these, that will lead to improved developer velocity, codebase maintainability, performance and scalability.

This engineer should not be constrained by a specific team’s mission or roadmap and should be able to work in, or across, multiple teams/orgs to deliver on the challenge.

Some examples of the initial challenges (in current order of priority) that have been identified are:

  1. Untangling the businesses logic from our GraphQL layer
  2. The revamp and rollout of license key management and gating of product features
  3. Implementing a more consistent and scalable architecture across our codebase akin to RFC 487 Review: Adopt Hexagonal Architecture for Repository Management

The engineer will be expected to own challenges end-to-end, collaborate with other teammates to come up with a solution, and then lead the implementation of the solution.

If a particular challenge is predominantly in a specific team’s domain the engineer will embed themselves in the team to ensure that the team is not only aligned with the solution but kept informed on the changes in their domain.

Expected impact

Drive technical strategy

  • Contribute to the technical direction at the org and company level.
  • Work closely with EM/PM of the teams in the org to validate the technical feasibility of the teams’ roadmaps.
  • Continually work with the teams in the org to understand their long-term vision and strategy, and provide strategic feedback to the Director of Engineering to ensure the org’s technical strategy is updated to drive efficiency and alignment.
  • Factor in the annual company and product strategies, and the plans of teams across engineering into technical decision-making.

Deliver key projects

  • Work with multiple teams and individuals to ascertain problems, scope solutions, present trade-offs in a concise way taking into account the wider context and priorities of the department, and achieve general consensus and buy-in for solutions.
  • Lead org-sized tasks that affect one or more complex systems or mission-critical areas.
  • Make high-quality long-term technical decisions.

Exhibit technical leadership

  • Technical proficiency and communication ability to be able to solely lead projects to completion or coordinate a team of engineers to deliver the solution.
  • Uplift teammates through feedback, mentorship, and sharing reusable patterns.
  • Effectively able to communicate technological needs and strategy to drive alignment in multi-team/stakeholder situations.
  • Proactively identify areas for improvement, beyond the scope of the org, and contribute meaningfully to solutions while continuing to deliver on the org’s goals.
  • Invest in technology, tools, and processes that benefit the entire engineering department.

Partnership modes

Advisor - Available to review artifacts, consult changes or designs, inject engineering context for PMs and EMs.

Collaborator - Available for all of the above, plus can be temporarily plugged into the team and work as any other member, respect meetings, standups, and whatever is required in order to drive the project(s) in question to completion.

Coordinator - all of the above, plus can own engineering issues spanning multiple teams.