Head of Engineering
Commonwealth Labs
COMMON lets you build community on your own terms. We create open spaces for coordination, where decisions are made transparently and any member can participate in improving their organization.
Our initial product is widely used by the crypto community—over 1000 web3 projects and DAOs collectively worth over $50 billion use COMMON as a hub for discussion and voting. Projects include Solana, NEAR, Polygon, Element Finance, dYdX, Osmosis, and many, many more. We support free and decentralized forms of expression and governance via chat messages, discussion threads, and formal votes. We hope our tools facilitate the community creation of culture, technology, and lasting public works. We’re always looking for like-minded people to join us.
As the Head of Engineering at COMMON, you will lead our engineering department through the pivotal phase of launching our protocol and delivering exciting new features to our product. You will manage the work of the front-end/product team, back-end/platform team, and protocol team, ensuring all efforts align with our strategic goals. Additionally, you will play a critical role in defining and maintaining cross-functional processes with product, design, growth, and operations teams. This position requires a leader who can balance hands-on technical work with strategic decision-making to deliver key features and iterate upon them post-launch. As part of the role, we still want you to want to ship code as well.
Key Responsibilities:
- Technical Oversight & Decision-Making:
- Oversee the technical direction and execution of the front-end/product team, back-end/platform team, and protocol team, ensuring alignment with COMMON’s objectives.
- Engage in hands-on engineering work, including code reviews, architectural decision-making, and direct contributions to complex or critical areas.
- Make executive decisions when the team is stuck, ensuring projects continue moving forward without disruption.
- Team Leadership & Process Management:
- Maintain and optimize processes to ensure the successful assignment and completion of engineering tasks, keeping teams focused on delivering key milestones.
- Conduct Top-of-Week and End-of-Week reviews with the Growth team to align on priorities and assess engineering performance related to bugs, protocol launch and new feature delivery.
- Lead Sprint Planning and Refinement sessions to ensure work items are ready for execution and aligned with COMMON’s strategic goals.
- Facilitate daily Standup Meetings to track progress and remove blockers.
- Strategic Planning & Cross-Functional Collaboration:
- Act as the engineering representative in cross-functional meetings, surfacing necessary information to maintain smooth workflows and align with the broader organizational strategy.
- Collaborate closely with Product, Design, Growth, and Operations teams to ensure engineering efforts are focused on delivering protocol launch, and subsequent feature iterations.
- Implement new processes as needed to address team dynamics or organizational challenges.
- Project Delivery & Risk Management:
- Drive the successful execution of protocol launch, managing timelines, resources, and risks.
- Track and report on project metrics, such as delivery timelines and story points, to provide transparency and accountability.
- Develop and implement risk mitigation strategies to ensure the smooth launch of new features and protocol updates.
- Team Development & Performance Management:
- Assess the performance of individual engineers and the team as a whole, advocating for compensation adjustments or team composition changes as needed.
- Foster a positive and productive engineering culture that encourages innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
Qualifications:
- Proven experience as a Head of Engineering, VP of Engineering, or similar senior leadership role in a fast-paced technology company, ideally with experience deploying and maintaining consumer-facing smart contract-backed products.
- Strong technical background, with hands-on experience in software engineering, architecture, and infrastructure management.
- Experience leading engineering teams through critical project launches, such as protocol deployments.
- Excellent leadership skills, with a track record of managing and developing high-performing engineering teams.
- Strong strategic thinking and problem-solving skills, with the ability to balance technical and business considerations.
- Experience with agile methodologies and a deep understanding of software development processes.
- Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams.
- Familiarity with most of the following technologies or similar: React, Typescript, Node / Express, Postgres, Redis, RabbitMQ, Heroku, Datadog, Cloudflare, AWS
What We Offer:
- Competitive compensation and performance-based bonuses.
- Flexible working hours and fully remote workplace.
- Opportunities for professional growth and development.
- A collaborative and inclusive work environment where your ideas are valued.
Common is proud to be an equal opportunity employer (EEO). We provide employment opportunities without regard to age, race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, disability (including gender dysphoria and similar gender-related conditions), sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation (including actual or perceived heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and asexuality), veteran status, military status, domestic violence victim status, reproductive health decision making or any other protected category.