Reverse Job Posting

I’ve spent the last few months joyfully decompressing, relaxing, traveling, and generally focusing on myself. It was a conscious decision to take some time off and it has been great. While I’ve written some code and stayed involved in WordPress here and there, I’ve also tried to spend more time behind my camera than on my computer screen.

I will be attending WordCamp Europe this week and would love to schedule some time to chat with anyone that thinks I would be able to help them. You can also get in touch to schedule a call.

As I think about what I want to do next, I have been coming up with a few ideas and I decided that I would post them in a manner similar to a job posting. This is inspired by Lara Schenck’s reverse job post which played a part in bring her onto my team at PMC.

Vice-President / CTO / Head of Engineering

As a senior engineering leader, Aaron will work to improve the quantity and quality of work the team produces.

Aaron believes that leaders need to be in the arena and continue to stay technical and hands-on while also recognizing that coding needs to be a low priority for an engineering leader.

Upon starting, Aaron will work to assess the workflow, team structure, and process that is currently in place. He will identify gaps in the team and work with the engineers and other engineering leaders to fill those gaps.

Aaron specializes in scaling up teams and organizations. He has helped double the size of engineering teams and has been responsible for putting in place hiring and career growth standardization while also improving the diversity of engineering organizations.

Success in this role will mean that Aaron has helped improve both the quality and quantity of the product Aaron is responsible for, voluntary departures are low in Aaron’s team, and Aaron’s team is seen as one of the individuals who have grown and improved.

Open Source Product Engineer

As an open-source product engineer, Aaron will work in and with the public on web applications. Aaron will shepherd important features, enhancements, and bug fixes from ideas to refined production code.

Aaron believes that a good open-source engineer is always making it easier for others to contribute. Through documentation, tooling, and developer advocacy, Aaron helps create a community around the software in addition to helping create the software itself.

The users of open source are more important than the people building the software, so Aaron will prioritize getting to know the users and understanding the problems they need to be solved.

Success in this role will mean that Aaron has made large meaningful contributions while also making others feel welcome and belonging in the community. The number of contributors and the number of users will both increase.

Staff Engineer

As a staff engineer, Aaron will be one of the top-level individual contributors in an organization. Aaron’s background as both a formal and informal leader will give him the insight to lead the most challenging and least defined projects from inception through completion and on to maintainability.

Aaron recognizes that getting early feedback from customers is one of the most valuable things for a product, so he will prioritize getting to an MVP quickly. Simultaneously, Aaron knows that if the software is hard to maintain then you can slow down development going forward, therefore Aaron will aim to make all technical debt deliberate and will get buy-in from other engineers and the product, project, and design teams who are also affected.

A true Full Stack web developer, Aaron is equally comfortable with work in the browser, work on the server, and DevOps work.

Regressions kill trust, so Aaron will aim to get automated testing going or improving from day 1. Aaron’s experience leading and training others to lead bug scrubs helps build a healthy backlog.

Success in this role will also mean that Aaron has mentored engineers since the best people make those around them better.

Common Elements for all positions

Aaron is looking to join a remote-first team that includes people of diverse backgrounds and experiences. This team is engaged in or working towards salary transparency with a focus on equity in compensation.

Aaron’s future team would describe itself as supportive, successful, and simultaneously silly and serious. A workplace isn’t a family but should be a place all tolerant people feel welcome and empowered to do great things.

No job is likely to perfectly match these descriptions, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you think I could be a solid contributor to your team. If you’re not familiar with my work, please check out my resume.