Posit's mission is to create free and open-source software for data science, scientific research, and technical communication. We do this to enhance the production and consumption of knowledge by everyone, regardless of economic means, and to facilitate collaboration and reproducible research, both of which are critical to the integrity and efficacy of work in science, education, government, and industry. We are a different kind of software company, and we’re proud to build and sell products that help people understand and improve the world through data.

The Sol-Eng Team

Posit’s Solutions Engineering (Sol-Eng) team aims to reduce the distance between Posit’s customers and our Pro and Open Source offerings, leading with curiosity and technical excellence. We combine deep knowledge of our products and market, empathy and kindness, and an understanding of IT/Admin practices and tools to help our customers deploy, install, configure, and use our professional products.

Sol-Eng has two missions at Posit. The first is to collaborate with Sales to prove the technical value of our software to prospects and customers in demos, customer proof of concepts, and in live Q&A. The second is to help customers who’ve purchased get up and running in one-off architecture and advisory sessions, as well as long-term engagements.

Our customer-facing work yields deep expertise of what they need from our products, which we use to provide the voice of the customer inside Posit, experiment with product configurations and integrations, and create websites, articles, documents, presentations, and demos to share with customers.

In our customer meetings, we most frequently speak with IT/Admins who are installing, configuring, and integrating Posit’s Pro Products in their environments. We also meet with data scientists and data science teams to help them get more from their data science workflows that use Posit’s Pro Products.

We are currently a team of 17, including a director and one manager.

The Role

As a manager, reporting to the head of Sol-Eng, you will be an essential component of the team’s leadership, which aims to hire, onboard, and develop the people on the team, set and communicate the team’s priorities, and determine and implement the processes to make the team successful.

Your number one responsibility as a manager on the Sol-Eng team would be the development of the people who report to you. We strongly value mastery and ownership, so the role of people manager on Sol-Eng is primarily about helping your direct reports develop a vision for their career at Posit, as opposed to managing their day-to-day work.

This role will primarily be focused on developing the parts of the SE organization that focuses on collaboration with the Sales team to close new business and drive expansions at existing customers. You’ll be responsible for working with our SEs who are primarily devoted to pre-sales activities, coordinating with Sales leadership at Posit, and addressing process issues throughout our pre-sales activities including assignments, load-balancing, information flows, and more. Additionally, you’ll lead out the part of the team that helps Data Scientists understand the value they can get from the Posit suite of products.

Even though this role is primarily managerial, focused on growing the people and processes of the Sol-Eng team, it is also highly technical. You won’t need to be able to do all of the roles on Sol-Eng, but you will need to be able to ask the right questions. By the time you're fully onboarded, you'll be reasonably fluent in data science workflows, IT/Admin tooling, Posit’s Pro Products, and the way Sol-Eng works at Posit.

Nobody shows up knowing all this, so you’ll spend some time onboarding like any other team member, and your technical skills will continue developing even after you’ve been on the team for a while.

You would own…

• Responsibility for the long-term alignment + growth of 4-7 direct reports. Your number one priority will be your direct reports’ clarity about their path at Posit.

• Hiring and onboarding new people for your team.

• Responsibility for the pre-sales focused parts of our work. This includes management of relevant staff, coordination with Sales leadership, contribution to the demo, evaluation, and sales process, and managing the creation of assets for proving value to customers.

• Pre-sales customer escalations. You’d be the main point of contact to help Sales staff at Posit figure out a way forward when they need escalated or special help from the SE team, including jumping in to directly work with prospects or escalating the issue upwards when needed.

You would assist…

• Setting direction for the whole team and building a team culture of psychological safety, technical excellence, and continuous improvement.

• Creating team-wide processes that allow us to scale, including processes for hiring and onboarding new team members; identifying, clarifying, and completing projects and customer engagements; and sharing knowledge across the team.

• Communicating with other teams across the company to make sure they know what Sol-Eng is up to, and vice versa.

Broad Timeline

By the end of your third month, you would…

• Meet the rest of the Sol-Eng team and a meaningful fraction of the rest of the company.

• Install and configure our Pro Products on a server, and try out using them for yourself.

• Join dozens of customer calls -- including product demo calls with data science teams, IT architecture calls with IT/Admins of Posit’s Pro products, and guided installs that go deep into the weeds of standing up our Pro Products.

• Begin managing 3-4 current team members, getting to know them, their career aspirations and values, and starting to understand what makes them tick at Posit.

By the end of your first year, you would…

• Begin managing several other people.

• Own part of the team’s process for identifying, scoping, prioritizing, assigning, and completing work.

• Identify 1-2 opportunities for meaningful improvement to SE team processes to grow the effectiveness, efficiency, and/or impact of the Sol-Eng team and begin implementing them.

• Identify a pipeline of people we might consider for Sol-Eng roles in the future.

• Develop relationships with people on other teams across the company to be more effective as a leader.