Engineering Manager

Hey there! We’re looking for a new member to join the Ghost team, maybe that’s you?

We’re a non-profit organisation on a mission to create modern, independent publishing technology to power the future of online journalism.

This is not a rocket-ship. You won’t find any unicorn glitter or exponential curves around here, just a real company with a sustainable business which has been profitable from year 1 and has been growing healthily ever since. Currently our annual revenue is $9,500,000+. We’re very transparent about our mission and our metrics, you can read all about us.

Ghost is a full stack web application for running independent publications. It’s one of the most popular modern open source projects in the world, and is used in production by tens of thousands of websites and companies.

Chances are you’ve already visited and read sites which run on Ghost! Our users range from renowned publications like 404 Media, Platformer, Tangle News, to prominent tech companies like YCombinator, First Round Review, Cloudflare and Kickstarter, and many, many more.

What we are looking for

For this position, we’re looking for an experienced people leader with a learning mindset and a strong software engineering background who is based in the Central or Eastern U.S. time zones. This role is accountable for improving the speed, reliability, and predictability with which teams deliver value to production – and for intervening when delivery slows down.

Teams at Ghost are typically made up of 2-4 product engineers, often collaborating with designers and SREs. The role we’re hiring for here will be responsible for managing the engineers on one or more of our teams, helping to plan work in collaboration with our product colleagues, and working directly with our engineers on the day-to-day challenges of delivering valuable software to production.

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager who cares deeply about people and feels uncomfortable when teams are moving slower than they should – someone who actively looks to improve flow, reduce friction, and increase momentum without burning people out.

We value healthy impatience: a bias toward action, learning through shipping, and making today a little better than yesterday.  We prefer small, fast experiments over prolonged analysis or waiting for perfect alignment.

Ghost is a full-stack, open source JavaScript web application. The primary technologies on the backend are Node.js/MySQL8, while our front-end stack is a mixture of Ember.js and an increasing amount of React. Any familiarity with our stack will be an advantage for someone applying for this position.

Here are a few examples of the work you’ll be doing:

• Continuously improve the rate at which your teams ship meaningful changes to production
• Reduce cycle time, handoffs, and avoidable waiting
• Help engineers break large, slow work into smaller, faster feedback loops
• Chatting regularly 1:1 with engineers, listening to their concerns, making sure they’re feeling engaged and able to make progress, and providing specific feedback on performance – both the good and the not-so-good
• Mentoring product engineers to help them grow and become the best engineers they’re capable of becoming.
• Use qualitative and quantitative signals (e.g. cycle time, work-in-progress, deployment frequency, incident trends) to understand where teams are stuck and where to intervene
• Coordinating internal documentation and guides to make sure that our bus factor is healthy, and new team members can be onboarded easily
• Working with support and product leadership to determine our appetite for addressing our prioritized bugs and issues
• Participating in the planning process by soliciting context for your teams and surfacing relevant information to the rest of the company
• Surfacing coordination/collaboration challenges with other teams and working with peers and leadership to continuously improve how we work as a company
• Participating in our incident response process as a coordinator of major product issues, following up on actions and ensuring they’re seen through to resolution
• Alongside our leadership team, hire and onboard new programmers: filtering resumes, conducting interviews, evolving our hiring process
• People who are highly self-motivated and great at written communication tend to do best at Ghost. The majority of our team is made up of former founders, freelancers and self-starters who are confident and comfortable working independently and getting things done

This role would be very well suited to someone who is a current Engineering Manager and a former Software Engineer with experience delivering software consistent with the Twelve-Factor methodology.

At Ghost, we’re excited about AI as a way to do more for our mission, and we value Engineering Managers who help teams turn that excitement into practical improvements in how they work.

This role may not be a good fit if you:

• Are uncomfortable applying pressure when delivery slows down
• Prefer stable, steady-state processes over continuously improving ones
• See pace and urgency as primarily the team’s responsibility rather than your own
• Believe that caring about people and expecting high performance are in tension
• Are more comfortable facilitating discussion than driving change

What it’s like to work here:

In 2020, a large number of companies became ‘remote‘ for the first time, and immediately transformed their conference rooms into Zoom calls as they sought to embrace a new world order: Micro-managing people… from a distance.

Ghost has been fully remote for more than a decade, so our entire culture has been shaped around that from day one. Since 2013, we’ve carefully crafted a calm working environment based on trust and autonomy. Most people here have 1 or 2 video calls a week, choose their own working hours, and have plenty of time for deep/focused work that takes place on their own terms.

Our two most fundamental values are freedom and responsibility, and you’ll be given plenty of both. We measure outcomes, rather than hours-worked.

This is not a fledgeling tech startup, fighting to survive and forcing everyone to work overtime. There’s no hustle, and we don’t grind. We believe that work should enable your life, not the other way around — so we encourage reasonable work schedules, plenty of time off, and solid sleep.

We value diversity of all types at Ghost and our team is made up of a kind, thoughtful group of people with a wide range of backgrounds. Between us, we speak 15 different languages. Some of us are single, others are married, while others are parents. We actively try to find people with different perspectives and experiences to the ones we already have. Women and minorities of any description are especially encouraged to apply!

Compensation & Location

• $160,000 – $190,000 USD. Final offer will be determined based on experience and performance during the interview process.
• Location requirement – Must be based in the Central or Eastern U.S. time zones. On top of that, we offer a range of benefits…

All jobs at Ghost come with

💵 Competitive salary Based on role, skill, experience and location.
🌍 Work from anywhere From a home office, or be a nomad if that’s your thing. Everything we do is online. As long as you have wifi, you’re all set.
💻 Hardware A brand new Macbook + an office workspace setup budget.
🏢 Co-working If you prefer to work from a co-working space, we’ll help pay for it.
📚 Continue your personal development  A budget for attending conferences, taking courses, and purchasing books.
✈️ Worldwide team trips The last few trips have taken us to the UK, Dubai, Thailand & Spain.
📅 4-day work weeks We close the office on a Friday. Enjoy!
🏝 Generous paid vacation If you don’t take a minimum of a 2 week break yourself, we’ll kick you out of the office in December.
👶 Paid parental leave When the time comes to welcome a new member of the family, we offer generous and fully paid parental leave.
📈 Performance reviews Everyone at Ghost receives an annual performance and pay review in line with market rates, so you’ll never be stuck on what you start on.
🐶 Dog friendly office …just kidding we literally don’t have an office. So, um. Feel free to work with your dog. Cats are cool, too.