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Salary: USD 120,000 - 140,000 / annual
LawnStarter is the nation's leading on-demand marketplace for lawn care and related services, with over $150M in annual bookings. The company is expanding beyond lawn care into a one-stop shop for outdoor home services including pest control, pool cleaning, and window cleaning.
You will lead cross-functional delivery teams of 4–5 engineers, reporting to the Head of Engineering. This is a people-first role focused on making sure your team ships reliably, grows professionally, and doesn't become a bottleneck as LawnStarter scales into new service verticals.
Key responsibilities include:
- People development: Build concrete growth plans for every individual contributor on your team, not just struggling performers. Know where each person is going and what it takes to get there.
- Delivery: Ensure your team ships on cadence with predictable quality. Surface risk early, manage scope, and maintain commitments without surprises.
- Team health: Address conflict directly. Manage underperformers with a clear process. Protect and develop top performers.
- Cross-functional partnership: Serve as the interface between your team and Product, Design, and other engineering teams. Make decisions rather than stall them.
- Technical direction: Stay close enough to the work to weigh in on system design and catch architectural risks, but focus on removing blockers rather than getting into the weeds.
- AI adoption: Actively introduce AI tools and workflows into how your team operates—code review, documentation, sprint planning, debugging. Set the pace on adoption.
The role addresses specific challenges: building people leadership depth as the team scales, managing distributed teams across time zones without losing culture or accountability, turning delivery consistency into a competitive advantage, orchestrating cross-functional delivery from roadmap to release, and turning AI adoption into throughput without sacrificing craftsmanship.
Year 1 success metrics include: every engineer has a documented growth plan within 60 days, your team ships committed scope on cadence within 90 days, zero surprise departures, underperformance addressed directly and documented, Head of Engineering trusts your team's commitments, and your team is visibly more AI-enabled.
Requirements:
- Deeply AI-integrated: You've gone well past casual ChatGPT usage. You've used Claude to accelerate code review, built prompts that help engineers write sharper tickets, or led your team's adoption of Copilot. Your first instinct when a task eats team time is to figure out if AI can handle it. You actively experiment, share what works, and set the pace on AI adoption—not follow someone else's lead.
- People developer: You can give concrete examples of career growth plans you've built, hard conversations you've had, and underperformers you've managed through a structured process. You spend 1:1 time on people, not status updates.
- Remote-native: You've led full-remote teams before as a default, not just as a COVID workaround. You know how to build trust without shared physical space, run async decision-making, and keep distributed engineers from feeling isolated.
- Direct in conflict: When there's tension on the team, you address it directly and quickly. You don't let it simmer.
- Data-driven: You articulate your team's performance in metrics—velocity, retention risk, IC growth—and use that data to make decisions.
- Technically credible: You stay close enough to the code to earn your engineers' respect through code reviews, architectural input, and helping debug under pressure. You don't need to be the best engineer, but your team needs to believe you understand what they're doing.
- Delegator: Your job is to build a team that makes good decisions without you. You coach engineers toward answers rather than provide them. When you go hands-on, it's deliberate and time-bounded.
