Head of Engineering

We're looking for an incredible Head of Engineering who can lead our engineering team as they design and build our world-class product for modern charities.

At Beacon we’re a growing technology startup building the best nonprofit-focused CRM in the world. We passionately believe in the power of technology to make a difference.

Chris and David, both software engineers, founded Beacon in 2017 to build a new kind of charity CRM using the latest technology and design principles.

Now hundreds of innovative charities around the world trust Beacon to run their core technology infrastructure. Animal welfare, human rights, disaster relief, cancer support - all powered by Beacon. You can see a quick demo of our product, here.

We have doing good at the core of our mission, but we're also profitable, privately owned, and our goals are for long term sustainable growth - not making a quick buck for venture capitalists.

At Beacon we take building exceptional software very seriously. In a recent survey by Fundraising magazine we were rated 4.9/5 on functionality and 5/5 on ease of use - we want to keep it that way!

We're a team of 10 full-stack in-house engineers who are entirely responsible for the development and maintenance of the Beacon product.

Our technology stack is built around JavaScript running on AWS. The front-end web app is built with React, making extensive use of Material UI. Beacon's back-end infrastructure is in Node.js, based around microservices running on AWS Lambda. All new endpoints are written using GraphQL, and we're big advocates. Our database infrastructure is a combination of Postgres and Google BigQuery. We're on a journey to introduce more TypeScript into our stack wherever appropriate! 

Responsibilities

Your focus will be on leading the technical team responsible for the whole Beacon product, from infrastructure to interface. You'll work directly with the founders and our existing engineering team to lead the design, development, and maintenance of a sophisticated and modern web application.

You will:

• Work with the Founders and Beacon’s senior engineers to solve our very hardest technical problems, and guide the implementation of the solutions you come up with
• Ensure that Beacon is built in a modern, sensible, maintainable, and scalable way
• Develop a profound understanding of the Beacon product, and contribute to product strategy
• Inspire and empower our team of in-house engineers, and manage the reorganisation of the engineering team as we scale
• Take ownership of how Beacon is tested, and ensure that the team are adhering to modern testing methodologies
• Contribute to prioritisation of our day-to-day backlog of features, chores, and bugs
• You’ll be comfortable stepping up and taking charge of the situation when bad things happen.  As alarms are blaring and deployments are failing, you’ll be cool as a cucumber.
• Investigate new technologies regularly. You’ll need to seek out new ways of doing things and drive the implementation of improvements to the Beacon product across the board
• Take ultimate responsibility for the stability and uptime of Beacon, and manage the systems and processes that ensure this stability.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of experience in an engineering leadership role at a B2B SaaS company, ideally as Head of Engineering, VP of Engineering, or CTO
• Extensive expert-level experience with our core technologies (Postgres, React, Node, AWS Lambda, and BigQuery)
• Absolutely superb communication skills.  You need to be able to communicate effectively across all of Beacon’s internal teams, including the founders, engineers, customer success managers, and the sales team. You’ll also need to be charming and friendly with external parties such as Beacon customers, partners, and integrations partners.

Benefits

• Our customers are all charities - you'll get to build your career whilst having a genuinely positive impact on the world
• Four day work week. Our working model gives everyone a 3 day weekend, every week.
• We'll give you 6 weeks (24 days) of holiday every year, plus bank holidays
• 6 week fully paid sabbatical every 5 years
• Taking time off is important. And we really mean it: We'll pay you a £60 bonus for every day of holiday you take
• Banded salary system so that everyone is paid the same for doing the same job, and compensation growth within the organisation is clear.
• Guaranteed pay rise to adjust for inflation every 12 months
• Beacon is climate positive (beyond carbon neutral), so your employment won't hurt the planet. Learn more
• A proper pension - we'll match 150% of your pension contributions (up to 10%)
• Private health insurance with routine dental & optical cover
• Modern parental leave policy (12 weeks at full pay, and it's the same for everyone, regardless of gender or circumstances)
• Cycle to work scheme

Working together

As a team we prefer to be together in our office (4-6 New Inn Broadway, London, EC2A 3PR) and we'd want you to join us - so this is not a remote role. We offer flexible working hours and while your usual place of work will be with us in the office, you can work home when you need to.

If you don’t live in London but would be happy to relocate, we can pay up to £4,000 (tax free) to help with your relocation costs.

We passionately believe in doing our part to address the tech sector's diversity problem

We believe that in building diversity we build strength.

We encourage everyone with the required skills to apply, we consider building a diverse and representative team to be critical to our success, and we actively pursue building a more diverse team.

We have a banded salary system to ensure that nobody is paid differently for the same role. Salaries across the organisation, including executive pay, are entirely transparent.

Our parental leave policy provides for 12 weeks of full pay, and can be taken by any parent, regardless of their new parenting circumstances.

We're delighted to be certified by Bloody Good Period as a ‘Bloody Good Employer’, and we're working towards becoming a certified BCorp.