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LawnStarter is the nation's leading on-demand marketplace for lawn care and related outdoor home services, with over $100M in annual bookings. The company operates three brands (LawnStarter, Lawn Love, HomeGnome) on shared infrastructure and is profitable and growing.
You will lead a cross-functional delivery team of 4–5 engineers, reporting to the Head of Engineering. This is a people-first management role focused on both delivery and people outcomes. Your responsibilities include:
People Development: Create concrete growth plans for every engineer on your team, not just struggling performers. You'll know where each person is headed and what it takes to get them there.
Delivery & Execution: Ensure your team ships on cadence with predictable quality. You surface risks early, manage scope, and communicate commitments clearly without surprises.
Team Health & Culture: Address conflict directly. Manage underperformers with clear processes. Protect and develop top performers. Build psychological safety and accountability.
Cross-Functional Leadership: Act as the interface between your team and Product, Design, and other engineering functions. Make decisions decisively rather than stalling.
Technical Direction: Stay close enough to the work to weigh in on system design and catch architectural risks, but not so deep that you're in the weeds instead of removing blockers.
AI Adoption: Actively introduce AI tools and workflows into team operations—code review, documentation, sprint planning, debugging. Lead adoption, don't follow it.
Key challenges you'll solve: building people leadership depth as the team scales into new service verticals; managing distributed teams across time zones without losing culture or accountability; turning delivery consistency into competitive advantage; orchestrating cross-functional delivery from roadmap to release; and turning AI adoption into measurable throughput without sacrificing craftsmanship.
Success in year one means 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; the Head of Engineering trusts your team's commitments; and your team is visibly more AI-enabled than when you joined.
