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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 into adjacent outdoor home services (pest control, pool cleaning, window cleaning) and operates three brands on shared infrastructure. The engineering team is profitable, growing, and ships constantly with end-to-end ownership.
You will lead a cross-functional delivery team of 4–5 engineers, reporting to the Head of Engineering. This is a people-first role focused on both delivery and people outcomes. Your responsibilities include:
**People Development:** Build concrete growth plans for every individual contributor on your team. Know where each person is headed and what it takes to get there. Manage underperformers with a clear, documented process. Protect and develop top performers.
**Delivery:** Ship on cadence with predictable quality. Surface risk early, manage scope, and meet commitments without surprises. Your team's velocity and reliability directly impact LawnStarter's ability to launch new services and capture market share.
**Team Health:** Address conflict directly and quickly. Build trust and accountability in a distributed, async-first environment across multiple time zones.
**Cross-Functional Partnership:** Act as the interface between your team and Product, Design, and other engineering functions. Make decisions without stalling. Hold business value and technical soundness in view simultaneously and make tradeoff calls.
**Technical Direction:** Stay close enough to the work to weigh in on system design and catch architectural risks. Remove blockers rather than getting stuck in the weeds.
**AI Adoption:** Actively introduce AI tools and workflows into team operations—code review, documentation, sprint planning, debugging. Set the pace on adoption; don't follow it.
**Year 1 Success Metrics:** Every engineer has a documented growth plan within 60 days. 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. Team is visibly more AI-enabled.
**Requirements:**
- **AI Integration:** Deep, hands-on AI usage beyond occasional prompting. You've used Claude for code review acceleration, built prompts for sharper tickets, or led team adoption of Copilot. Your first instinct when a task consumes time is to explore AI solutions. You actively experiment and set the pace—not follow it. This is a poor fit if your AI usage is limited to occasional prompting or if you describe yourself as "AI-curious" rather than AI-native.
- **People Development:** Concrete examples of career growth plans you've built, hard conversations you've had, and underperformers you've managed through structured processes. You spend 1:1 time on people, not status updates. Poor fit if your examples are mostly process improvements or shipping milestones, or if you blame team outcomes on engineers rather than the environment you built.
- **Remote Leadership:** Proven experience leading fully remote teams 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. Poor fit if you haven't managed a fully remote team in a leadership position or feel remote work is harder than in-person management.
- **Direct Conflict Resolution:** You address tension quickly—between engineers, between engineering and product, or between performance and expectations. You don't let issues simmer. Poor fit if you've left roles due to unresolved conflict or if your examples are mostly about "creating space for dialogue" without resolution.
- **Data-Driven:** You articulate team performance in metrics—velocity, retention risk, IC growth—and use data to make decisions. Poor fit if your answers are mostly common-sense observations without specific numbers or outcomes.
- **Technical Credibility:** You stay close enough to code to earn engineers' respect through code reviews, architectural input, and debugging under pressure. You don't need to be the best engineer, but your team must believe you understand their work. Poor fit if you've fully transitioned to pure management and haven't touched technical work in years.
- **Delegator:** You build a team that makes good decisions without you. You coach engineers toward answers rather than providing them. When you go hands-on, it's deliberate and time-bounded. Poor fit if your instinct is to take over when the team struggles, if you become the access point for all requests, or if output drops when you're unavailable.
