Right now, Junction is growing our engineering leadership team, and one common point of ambiguity or misalignment is how hands on should I be and what does being hands on mean.
We don't believe in purely pastoral managers. Engineering leaders at Junction are hands-on and technical, and that doesn't stop once you've built a team or got more senior. I still ship code. Amongst other high leverage activities.
Here's today's calendar:
| Time | What |
|---|---|
| 08:45 | Interview |
| 10:30 | Candidate debrief |
| 11:30 | 1:1 |
| 12:00 | Interview |
| 13:45 | Weekly hiring sync |
| 14:00 | 1:1 |
| 14:30 | External call with a lab |
| 15:00 | Engineering standup |
| 15:30 | Leadership team meeting |
| 17:00 | Customer call |
I start around 8:30 with a bit of catch up. Messages, candidate pipelines, what PRs have been opened and merged, new support tickets, customer requests and feedback. Then straight into a product engineer interview.
After that I've got a gap until 10:30, where I'll be working on a feature to improve the dashboard search experience for users. I'll typically be working on something small, or important but not urgent.
That lasts until I notice some user feedback has come in to support about a different feature I worked on recently. They like it, but there's a small bug. I set an agent off to look into it and prep a couple of possible fixes, and go back to what I was doing.
Someone from our people team has asked me to review an update to the careers page (we have code contributed by non-technical people at Junction). I look through the PR, leave a couple of bits of copy feedback, and make a note of a different way of handling repo permissions across our GitHub. And I look over the fixes the agent came back with and pick one, open the PR.
At 10:30 there's a debrief for a candidate, then a 1:1, then another product engineer interview at midday.
After lunch I chip away at our SOC 2 recertification and its crushing number of small admin tasks. Today's highlight is our compliance tooling not recognising the query syntax our alerts use.
Throughout this day, there are also a couple of discussions going on in the leadership channel, one about a significant cultural decision and one about an important project. I keep coming back to both and weigh in.
At 14:30 there's an intro call with a lab partner's technical team about an important project we're building with them. I'm not implementing on this one. I've got the right engineers on the call to validate our approach, and I'm flagging a couple of things that might bite us later.
Around the meetings I fit in two RFCs: one I'm reviewing with an engineer working on a significant project, and another that has been republished after a slight change in approach.
Our 1.5 hour leadership meeting is at 15:30. During the leadership meeting I remember that a few people who've accepted offers but haven't started yet need inviting to the engineering offsite I'm organising in a few weeks, so I make a note to do that afterwards.
The day finishes with a weekly sync with one of our customers. We've shipped 4 or 5 small quality of life things that will make a real difference to their users, so it'll likely be a good one.
If you're thinking of applying
You'll be hands-on from your first week, and continue as long as you're in the role.
Today was a feature that will be used by thousands, compliance, a bug, a careers page, a lab integration, two RFCs, four hiring conversations, a customer call, some offsite planning and a culture debate.
You own all of it. Which means a lot of responsibility, and a lot of impact.
We're hiring: junction.com/careers