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Engineering Manager

Software engineering


  1. You’re good at error-handling and writing code that works always, not usually.
  2. You’re good at code quality, readability, naming, formatting, comments, etc.
  3. You’re good at low-level design like encapsulation, modularity, cohesion, coupling, etc.
  4. You’re good at listening, understanding the question asked, and then communicating nuanced ideas in a precise and unambiguous manner.
  5. The work in this job will be backend-centric, so we’re looking for the following backend engineering skills:
  6. You’re productive with any one backend framework.
  7. You’re productive with any one language used in backend development.
  8. You’re experienced at building REST or GraphQL APIs, in collaboration with frontend engineers.
  9. You’re productive working with any database.

Leadership & Management


  1. Lead: You lead other software engineers, taking responsibility for the outcomes of the your team, across various dimensions like scalability, reliability, data loss prevention, security, compliance, UX, and a healthy engineering culture of innovation and excellence in software development.
  2. 3 types of work: You perform the following three areas of work:
  3. People management: Hiring, onboarding, giving feedback, coaching, offboarding when needed…
  4. Leadership: Reviewing other people’s work (e.g., code reviews, design reviews, project plan reviews, mid-course project reviews…)
  5. IC: Working as an IC at least a day a week. You should timebox this time, saying no to any other activities that would intrude into this time.
  6. Architecture: You take responsibility for the architecture, making sure the right frameworks and libraries are used, to build a technical foundation on top of which other engineers work.
  7. Debugging: You debug hard problems, even hard problems in code you’re unfamiliar with, that nobody else in the team can debug.
  8. Fail fast: You identify risks, check feasibility, and fail fast.
  9. Team health: You ensure that the team is healthy, where each person has a balance between work he finds fulfilling and work he finds not, important (long-term) work is not neglected because of the noise of urgent (short-term) work, refactoring (say client-agnostic work into a base layer that can be applied to all clients)… You ensure that the team is on an upward spiral rather than a downward spiral and you don’t hesitate to push back against business people regardless of seniority.
  10. Knowledge sharing: You share knowledge in the team, whether writing documentation like design docs, conducting talks or other ways, to upskill team members, get newcomers up to speed quickly, and have a healthy bus factor.
  11. Top-down and bottom-up: You work strategically to deliver agreed-upon company goals (top-down). You also explore new goals / directions / projects to generate value in ways that haven’t been considered by the existing team (bottom-up).
  12. Prioritisation: There’s always more work to do than time, so you prioritise proactively, considering both urgency and importance of tasks.
  13. Collaboration: You’re good at collaborating downward (working with engineers of varying levels of experience), upward (with founders), and laterally (with other teams like Data Engineering, Product, UX, DevOps and Business). For example, you’d collaborate with Product to translate business requirements into technical solutions. You might collaborate with designers by proposing an alternative UX that’s easier to implement while working well enough for users.
  14. Project management: You’re a good project manager, assigning work to engineers, checking progress, resolving blockers, and communicating status to different stakeholders. You fail fast, such as identifying the risks in a project and addressing them early so that we fail in a week rather than a quarter. Or you have good intuition to flag these at a proposal stage. You set expectations like “This will take a quarter or two” rather than saying at the end of every sprint that it will be done next sprint.
  15. Lifecycle: You’re good at the entire software development lifecycle from prototyping to design to coding to deployment to enhancement to maintenance.
  16. Ill-defined tasks: You take on problems that are vague in engineering, product and UX aspects, and work cross-functionally to progress despite ambiguity.

Mindset


  1. You never say “that’s not my problem” — if you see a problem, you either fix it or flag it.
  2. High growth potential. It matters more how fast you grow than how much you know as of today. In fact, it’s fine if you’re lacking in the above skills if you demonstrate fast growth, because you will learn the missing skills.
  3. You mentor junior engineers and help them grow.
  4. Earning respect: You earn the respect of the team and lead via influence, pulling out the “because I’m the manager” card only as a last resort.

Why you should consider this job


  • Big market: There are billions of borrowers in the world and most adults need some form of formal credit.
  • Industry disruption: We’re uniquely qualified to significantly improve the collections industry by solving the unsolved problems: First, the market is fragmented and there is no one big player. Second, existing players just pressure the borrower to repay without listening to their unique problems. When you work with us, you get to build the future of this industry.
  • Funding & Revenue: We’re funded by Blume, IndiaQuotient & Better Capital. We are at USD 2m ARR with a growth of 3x just the last 12 months. We are in the top 1% of startups of similar stage when it comes to revenue and close to break even.
  • Culture: We’ve built a culture based on being direct to each other in a high-trust environment, and working together in an ego-less manner to do what’s right for the customer. We go the extra mile to make sure we treat each person fairly. During evaluation of our employees, we really make sure that we take multiple inputs from people they work with and ensure that we minimise bias.
  • Support to succeed: In this job, you’ll have all the support you need to succeed, such as access to highly qualified engineers, the ability to hire more if needed and sufficient cloud budget.
  • Experimentation: We believe in experimentation, that we need to try a couple of things before we find the one that works. We’ll support you in your experiments, with an appropriate experimentation time and money budget if you think that helps.
  • Work with founders are highly accomplished. We have seen multiple startup journeys over the last 10+ years.
  • Ananth Shroff launched Exotel’s Indonesia business division when he was just 22. At Setu, he was responsible for GTM for getting from 0 to 1 Billion USD GTV, contributing to Setu’s acquisition.
  • Ranjith BR was responsible for bringing the integration TAT from 4 months to 1 week which was crucial for onboarding 18k merchants in 1 year and achieving the 1 Billion USD GTV at Setu.

About DPDzero

Credit penetration in India faces significant challenges, necessitating focused attention. Without proper infrastructure, extending credit to unserved and underserved populations remains elusive.


DPDzero is on a mission to enhance credit penetration by enabling lenders to concentrate on acquiring new customers, while we handle delinquency management. We are an 18-month-old startup, collaborating with over 20 lending partners . We have secured $3.25 million in seed funding from Blume Ventures, India Quotient, Better Capital, etc.

Company Description:

DPDzero is a pioneering fintech company dedicated to extending formal credit access to the next billion individuals in India. Our cutting-edge platform leverages machine learning and a digital-first approach to transform the lending industry. By prioritizing compliance, data-driven decision-making, and a culture of experimentation, we aim to maximize value for lenders while delivering an unparalleled customer experience. Join us as we revolutionize the financial landscape and empower individuals with greater financial opportunities.


Customers:

At DPDzero, we work with a diverse range of ambitious lenders, both established players and emerging disruptors, who are reshaping the credit ecosystem in India. Some of our esteemed customers include Cashe, Ring, TATA Capital, IndusInd Bank, KreditBee, and more, with new additions each month.


Our Approach:

We partner with our lenders by taking charge of their collections portfolio, allowing them to focus on customer acquisition while we ensure efficient recovery from their customers. Our technology-driven platform leverages machine learning algorithms to optimize collections strategies and drive maximum recovery rates.

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