Manager of Application Development - Buying

SSENSE (pronounced [es-uhns]) is a global technology platform operating at the intersection of culture, community, and commerce. Headquartered in Montreal, it features a mix of established and emerging luxury brands across womenswear, menswear, kidswear, and Everything Else. 

SSENSE has garnered critical acclaim as both an e-commerce engine and a producer of cultural content, generating an average of 100 million monthly page views. Approximately 80% of its audience is between the ages of 18 to 40. It is privately held and has achieved high double digit annual growth and profitability since its inception.

Reporting to the Director of Software Development, the Development Manager will lead a team of results-driven Software Developers within the Buying & Sell-through domain. The buying intelligence team builds the technologies that help us determine what merchandise to buy, how much of it to buy, and what attributes (color, size, etc..) sell better than others? We build end-to-end solutions that are intuitive and easy to use. We simplify & automate the buying process, while leveraging data analytics & machine learning at every step of the way.

The ideal candidate has the ability to see the big picture from both a technical and business perspective, leadership skills to motivate the team, and the foresight to help strategize and drive the team in delivering corporate objectives. As a key player, this role provides the opportunity to make an impact on our development and QA efforts, while influencing the product strategy and direction.

RESPONSIBILITIES 

• Manage software development teams from initial inception of ideas to delivery

• Develop a deep understanding of the product roadmaps for the teams, including future features to be developed

• Provide leadership and guidance to hire, coach, motivate, and lead a performance-driven team of highly skilled Tech Leads and Software Developers to achieve their full potential

• Work closely with the development teams to architect and implement best-in-class technical designs and approaches

• Ensure technical and quality standards are enforced throughout the software development lifecycle

• Facilitate the day-to-day activities of the development teams within an Agile/Scrum environment

• Report on status of development, quality, operations, and system performance 

• Ensure successful and functional on-boarding of new developers

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REQUIREMENTS

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field

• A minimum of 5 years experience managing teams to deliver complex applications

• A minimum of 7 years experience with software development best practices, including coding standards and code reviews, source control management, build processes, and automated testing

• A minimum of 3 years experience working in a microservices architecture with Agile software development methodologies

• Experience with AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure

• Strong preference for candidates with experience in Data Engineering or ML Engineering

• Knowledge of a broad range of modern programming languages including Python, Javascript, and ReactJS

• Knowledge of relational and nonrelational databases

• Understanding of predictive analytics is an asset

SKILLS

• Highly analytical and detail oriented, with a strong business acumen

• Ability to influence and drive change, with a high sense of accountability and ownership

• Strong leadership, project management, time management, and problem solving skills

• Ability to present complex technical information in a clear and concise manner to a variety of audiences

• Solution-oriented mindset and can-do attitude to overcome challenges

WORLD CLASS TECHNOLOGY 

Technology is at the core of everything we do at SSENSE. Driven by an engineering mindset and a problem-solving attitude, we blend fashion with technology to deliver an unparalleled experience to our customers as we build seamless, custom solutions to deliver the SSENSE offering. 

WORLD CLASS TEAM
The SSENSE tech team is responsible for an international headless commerce platform. Working in an agile environment, our squads are made up of experienced innovators in Product Management, QA, Design, DevOps, Software Development, Machine Learning, Data Engineering, and Security. Headquartered in Montreal, our technology organization has been growing at a rate of 2X year-over-year and is doubling once again in 2021 as we expand across Canada, US, and Europe.  

WORLD CLASS PLATFORM 

The SSENSE platform runs on Amazon Web Services making use of serverless microservices across web, mobile and app. Our event-source architecture already achieves over 10,000 requests / second and growing at an unmatched pace, currently unseen across the industry.  Our data-driven culture of innovation empowers every product team across the tech organization to explore building, testing and learning with the latest in Machine Learning techniques. Our automated continuous improvement DevOps model (making use of both blue / green and canary deployments) results in an average of 50 production releases every day.  

Read more about us on our SSENSE Tech Blog.