Engineering Manager

at  VivaCity

TEAM MANAGER, RESEARCH & EDGE COMPUTING

Salary: £85-95k plus benefits
Hybrid remote: ~1-2 days per week in our office in Old Street, London
Reporting to: Shaun Howell, our Head of Research

ABOUT US

At VivaCity, we help cities solve their biggest transport challenges. Our work saves lives by giving councils the road safety data they need to make targeted and effective improvements. We reduce congestion by making traffic lights more intelligent, and we use actionable insights to empower cities to make the right choices around sustainability.
To do this, we create cutting-edge products using machine learning, including sensors with on-board video AI capabilities, data visualisation dashboards and APIs, and city-wide control and optimisation algorithms. We’re now present in 100+ cities across the UK, US, and Australia, with many thousands of sensors producing billions of data points a year.
We are looking for an experienced Team Manager to lead our largest technical team, responsible for our product’s core AI and algorithms, which is central to the company’s expansion into new markets and products. If you want to use your deep technical management experience to save lives alongside an exceptional team, we’d love to hear from you!

YOUR DAY-TO-DAY WORK WILL INCLUDE SEVERAL KEY COMPONENTS:

• Collaborating with leadership to develop and implement team vision and strategies
• Manage timelines, stakeholder expectations, and team alignment, ensuring clear technical plans and communication, whilst ensuring focus on customer outcomes
• Balancing innovation, rapid prototyping, feature delivery, and scalability improvements, while effectively managing both engineers and researchers

As an experienced builder of high-profile teams:

• Building a high performance team culture which enshrines Vivacity’s values and empowers your team to bring their full self and energy to their work
• Applying your experience as well as performance metrics to prioritise and implement process and tooling improvements
• Proactively address bottlenecks and empower team members, while maintaining accountability through performance monitoring and mitigation strategies

As an experienced line manager

• Providing a constant source of energy for the team, emphasising each person’s impact, whilst proactively ensuring psychological safety in the team
• Using a coaching management style to help your team members continuously grow in their roles, proactively looking for opportunities for them to develop their skills
• Representing your team within the business and championing their voice, as well as inputting on department initiatives such as career pathways

THE ROLE

As our Research & Edge Computing Team Manager, you will be responsible for the largest technical team at Vivacity: a 6-person team which owns our core computer vision capabilities and road safety data algorithms. You will lean on your experience to effectively plan and deliver the team’s roadmap and technology, whilst nurturing your team members, as well as iterating team processes and instilling high-performance methodologies. You’ll report to the Head of Research, and will work closely with our Product and Delivery teams. Your split of time between duties will vary, but will approximately be:

IN YOUR FIRST 90 DAYS IN THE ROLE, YOUR TASKS WILL INCLUDE:

• Get up to speed on the business context for your team and products
• Update your team’s roadmap to cover the next 3-6 months based on commercial priorities and your experience
• Develop Objectives and Key Results, aligned with this roadmap
• Work closely with product to develop release plans for the items on your roadmap, including quality assurance testing steps
• Leading refinement meetings: guiding the scoping and design of technical work items from a lens of commercial focus and urgency
• Working closely with workstream owners to manage the day to day of product delivery, for example through critical path planning, stakeholder updates, and technical alignment alongside specialists
• Integrating deeply into your team’s day-to-day and contributing positively to team culture through thoughtful and frequent communication
• Build close line manager relationships with your reports through regular 1-1s, office attendance and ad-hoc meetings
• Work with leadership to input on a career framework being developed
• Work with your reports to develop personal development plans, aligned with this framework
• Use your experience and business context to proactively shape the way the team operates
• Unblocking team members through technical input and contributing towards key tasks where time permits