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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 is expanding into new service verticals (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**: Create concrete growth plans for every engineer on your team. You understand each person's trajectory and what it takes to get there. You develop underperformers with clear processes and protect top performers.
**Delivery**: Your team ships on a predictable cadence with consistent quality. You surface risks early, manage scope effectively, and maintain reliable commitments.
**Team Health**: Address conflict directly. Manage underperformance transparently. Build a healthy, accountable team culture.
**Cross-Functional Partnership**: 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 close that you're in the weeds instead of removing blockers.
**AI Adoption**: Actively introduce AI tools and workflows into your team's 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, 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 1 means every engineer has a documented growth plan within 60 days, your team ships committed scope on cadence within 90 days, zero surprise departures, direct management of underperformance, and visibly increased AI adoption across the team.
