🔭 Looking Towards the Next Adventure in 2024 - A Reverse Job Post

I am officially looking for my next career adventure, interviewing now with the goal of starting at a company in late CYQ1 this year (late February - March preferred).

• When
• Where
• About me
• What I’m looking for
  • Location
  • Working Hours
  • Size
  • Type of work
  • Culture
  • Extras
  • Pros
  • Cons
  • Deal-breakers
• Contact me
• FAQs

⌚️ When

While I am actively engaging in interview discussions beginning now, please be aware that my preferred earliest start date is Monday, March 4st, and my latest preferred start date is Monday, April 22nd.

That said, if your preferred start date for an open role is earlier than this time frame, I am open to the discussion. Let’s chat!

🌎 Where

I live in Seattle, WA. I am exclusively looking to join remote / distributed-first organizations.

I follow all guidance from the WHO and the CDC, as well as the reported COVID case rates where the company is meeting. When the case rates are high, let’s work together to accommodate remote-first alternatives to travel. I am happy to organize or attend any organizational events remotely.

👩🏻‍🎤 About Me

If you are looking for high-level information about my professional experience, please refer to my resume or LinkedIn profile.

I am a queer, bilingual (English, Spanish) dual (Bermudian, American) citizen who was half-raised in Bermuda, half-raised in Las Vegas, Nevada.

I’ve been in the tech industry for over 20 years, with focus spanning across:

• Technical Support
• Systems Engineering
• Software Quality Assurance
• Build and Release Engineering
• Production Engineering / SRE

For each area, I learned and gained technical and leadership experience before moving on to the next discipline.

My college education (political science, environmental science, economics) was invaluable to mastering how to learn and explore: Exploration through reading, attending conferences, hands-on learning, talking to field experts, and attending specific trainings.

I’m a people-first leader, preferring to work collaboratively to solve complex problems and make communities better.

I am adept at understanding organizations and systems at a macro-level as well as a micro-level, and my managering is a reflection of this understanding.

I am highly organized and love building helpful, concise documentation frameworks to help people express ideas and hone engagement and learning. I care about outcomes. I optimize towards learning, reflection, then action: Move deliberately and fix things.

I care very deeply about people. I believe that treating folks with kindness and respect in the workplace should have equal care and weight as OKRs, KPIs, or other business objectives. It’s people that complete business objectives.

Hiring is expensive.

Teams are immutable.

Building trust and psychological safety is foundational to outcomes of high-performing, creative teams.

In my next role, here are some of the things I am looking for…

🔎 What I’m looking for

I prefer to be a leader that supports:

👥 People. When meeting with you about a role, I am going to ask you many questions about people-centric company culture and policies.

What is the company strategy and philosophy regarding employee retention and support? What do you value in the interviewing experience? What is your level of transparency on pay, benefits, and the company leveling system? What systems are in place that support career progression and learning? What practices and procedures do you have in support of DEI and healthy cultures? What are the key areas where the company is making investments? How open is the company to evolving and changing in any of these areas?

🧱 Sustainability. How are decisions made at the company? How transparent is this process to all employees? If not entirely clear, what discussions, forums, actions are happening to gain better clarity? Are roadmapping strategy discussions unidirectional or bi-directional? What is the company burn rate? What is the runway? LTV? CAC? As a manager, what tools do I have at the ready to engage and collaborate with folks to ensure business objectives are met?

📜 Clear, Moral Mission and Values. The past few years in tech have seen tremendous change and challenges - for businesses, associated communities, and individuals. With the increased progression of climate change, societal change, and other tech-adjacent impacts, I believe that it’s important - now more than ever - to join an organization with a clear, actionable company mission that results in a net-positive good for communities around the world.

Examples:

• Direct support of clean technologies and their forecasting models (wind, solar, hydro)

• Providing equity to communities without access

• Providing technology that makes people happier and healthier (music production, education, information discovery, etc.)

Beyond this, what company structures exist to encourage and facilitate discussion about the moral or ethical implications surrounding the things we are building?

🎹 Working Hours

My preferred working hours are between 9AM - 5PM Pacific, with room for flexibility to tend to the normal day-to-day things: Have lunch, get exercise, or step away for a walk to reflect so that I can make the best, forward-thinking, creative solutions in support of my colleagues.

🎚 Size

My ideal organization size is between 50 and 250 employees, where I am managing 6 - 15 people (managing ICs or managing managers). I am very comfortable managing at this level and will remain happy managing at this level for the forseeable future.

If this company size doesn’t fit your org, I may still be open to speaking with you about roles if you are in a place where there’s sprawl and complexity, you have identified at an org level that change is needed, and you intend to hire someone with the budget and latitude to make changes happen.

🧩 Type of Work

I am interested in managing a SDET, QA, CI/CD, Infra, Release, Platform, or DevOps team/organization. I’ve managed single teams (4-6 FTE) and I have also managed multiple teams with entirely different functions simultaneously (4-6 FTE; 2-3 contractors). While I’m comfortable managing at both scopes, when starting at any company I’d prefer managing a single team before segueing to managing multiple teams, to ensure I have time to ramp up with the company, setup, people, etc. before branching out.

💞 Culture

People: Smart, Kind, Growth Mindset, and open to change, empathetic, and inclusive. Prefers data-driven decisions and changes.

Remote work & flexibility: Teams have the tools they need to collaborate effectively without being in the same room. People are comfortable with asynchronous communication to account for teammates with varying schedules and time zones. Meetings are used thoughtfully and sparingly to ensure people have focus time to complete heads down work like coding.

Communication and Feedback: Folks in the organization embrace true bi-directional feedback across the business. No matter who or where you are in the organization - from IC to C-level leadership: A genuine interest in getting candid, kind feedback. Folks believe that receiving constructive, actionable feedback is a gift.

Collaboration: Folks work together as a team to solve problems. Work is not done on islands or in secret. Prefers “No Hero” culture. People err on the side of writing things down to share information with others.

Work/Life Balance: You prefer to work at a sustainable pace, so you are successful with a low risk of burnout. Working on nights or weekends only happens rarely in extreme situations. When people leave work at the end of the day or go on vacation, they are able to disconnect.

Celebration: The company makes space for celebrating teams for their work and reaching key milestones - not only through shoutouts, but through team events as well.

👑 Extras

It would be amazing to speak with companies who have the following policies in place:

• Standardized 4-day work week;
• Menstrual Leave;
• Minimum PTO

👍🏻 Pros

I am looking for the following benefits in my next company:

• Your company has a great mission and values framework. Bonus points to work involving environmental science, education, indie gaming, art, or music.
• A flexible working schedule. As mentioned earlier, I tend to work between 9AM - 5PM Pacific. While I can start/end later in the day by a few hours, I am not available earlier than 9AM.
• At least 3 weeks paid vacation. If there is an unlimited PTO policy, I want to know more about what mechanisms are in place company-culture wise to ensure that folks are getting enough time off to rest and recharge.
• Unlimited sick leave.
• 401K match.
• Health benefits are mostly or 100% paid for by the company, and includes vision and dental coverage.
• Mental health care is included in health care coverage, and is not a 3rd party service offering like Ginger.
• Additional time off in support of learning, conferences, outreach, and volunteerism.

👎🏻 Cons

• You have recently had or expect to have an executive leadership change. While I’m still open to discussing roles, I will want to take additional time in discussion to understand why the change is happening, as well as what the strategy pivots the business will have to make to responsibly adapt (hiring the new leader and what the interview process is like, evaluating in-flight projects, staffing, etc.)
• The role has little to no functional or fiscal agency to direct and manage positive team or organizational change.
• Security team:
  • The team is fewer than 3 people and/or security consulting is not actively engaged for systems audits and remediation.

🚫 Deal-breakers

Below are company deal-breakers - your company goals/interests/policies and mine are not aligned:

• Type of company/work:

  • Your company is Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, Palantir. Additionally, if your company engages in any of the following, I am not interested in working for you:
  • Aggregation and use of PII data with the goal of influencing, marketing, or otherwise manipulating people without their knowledge or consent (ala Cambridge Analytica);
  • Gig work;
  • Associated with weapons, arms, defense, police. Additionally, any collaboration with private or governmental institutions (Eg. DOD, DHS, ICE, CIA, FBI; Lockheed-Martin, etc.)
  • Anything involving blockchain, crypto, NFTs, web3, etc.;
  • Anything involving OpenAI, Midjourney, or any other massively scaled LLM trained on general internet data without user consent;
  • Actively engaged in union-busting.

• Interviewing Expectations:

  • Inclusion of any coding exercise - take home or otherwise. I am interviewing for a management role, not an IC role. If you want to get an idea of my programming fluency, please refer to my Github profile and project repos.

• Working Requirements:

  • Expectation to work in an office in a part-time or full-time capacity;
  • Travel (during high pandemic case rates)

• Culture and Dynamics:

  • Expects off-hours (evening, weekend) communication by default;
  • Any sector of employees within the company are not given a living wage or inclusive hours

• Employee support/DEI:

  • You don’t have an HR team.
  • You don’t have a recruiting team.
  • You cannot disclose general employee demographic information when requested.
  • You don’t have any women/non-binary folks in engineering leadership.

• Your company expects EMs contribute code along with ICs on projects. This set of working expecations for managers sets up the manager and their team for failure and conflict.

☎️ Contact me

If what I’ve written resonates with you and you’d like to speak with me about roles at your company, please book time with me to chat! So that I’m prepared for the conversation, please include a little bit about yourself, the role/req, and a little bit about the company. Looking forward to speaking with you. 💜

Written by Brenna Flood (they/them or she/her), software engineering leader and co-organizer of the Open Source and Feelings conference. Follow them on Mastodon.