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Ask HN: What should this role be called?

2 points by meric ↗ HN
The duties are:

* Look for performance and scalability problems for two products caused by inefficient code, and then fix them.

* Continually refactor code written by others in the company for two products.

* Responsible for the hardware-architecture of two systems. (e.g. where servers are located, how many, which database..., what ports,...)

* Setting up a process of continuous integration and unit testing.

* Review code written by others in the company.

* Communicate and coordinate with (outsourced) sysadmins who manage our servers.

My employer wants to call this "product management" since I'm "managing products" but that is incorrect, so I want to suggest a less incorrect name to label all these tasks. Product management involves what to build into a product to satisfy user demand; the above tasks include none of that. He is reluctant to call me "Lead Engineer" because there are already engineers leading each product; and 3 lead engineers out of 5 seemed a lot.

Basically, the technical founder of the startup I work for wants to transition into sales and needs someone to (slowly) replace him.

I might as well ask what would you expect the salary for this position be? I won't be doing all of it at first because I'm not experienced in all of those tasks; he plans to spend several months or more for training and transition.

7 comments

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lutusp
On the basis of the first two lines, I would have said "Interface Engineer." The issue, the problem, is the interface between the two products. So -- Interface Engineer.

But as I read on, I see it's a bit more complicated than that. So maybe my suggestion isn't ideal.

meric
The two products share some code but the systems aren't connected. I mis-worded the first point...
xcirrian
For me the position is more like a dev Team Director coz it's involved with front-end, backend, testing, performance and etc.
fitandfunction
Principal Engineer or Lead Engineer. In particular, you want someone with experience in very early-stage startups (where they might have been responsible for some hardware decisions).
meric
Thanks.

"very early-stage": Is it relevant we currently have over 100,000 users and are already profitable?

fitandfunction
The point about the "very early stage" is that it's unlikely for one single person to have all the skills you want unless they had no other choice, i.e. they were the first or second engineer in a startup.

So, to find one person to satisfy your job description, look for someone who was an early engineer at a startup.

Or, hire two people (who will usually cost you less money).

In SV, the recommendation is to hire that one special person, but I'm not so sure. This is particularly true if you live outside a hub (SV, Seattle, etc) and this type of employee becomes even more rare.

byoung2
Maybe something like Performance Optimization Engineer, given the amount of code review and refactoring involved.