3 billion people across the world work in frontline jobs. Yet, despite rising costs and staff shortages, frontline organisations are still left to choose between paper, Excel, and WhatsApp, or decade-old workforce management solutions to take care of the most important part of their businesses - their people.
Enter Sona: the next generation of AI-native, frontline workforce management. We’ve built an end-to-end platform covering Scheduling, HR, Payroll, and Communications that gives the largest frontline organisations everything they need to staff more intelligently and empower their teams.
In under 4 years, we’ve already made a deep impact on the lives of over 100k frontline workers and the operation of their organisations, grown the team to 110+, and secured over $50M in funding from notable VC’s, including Felicis, Northzone, Gradient Ventures (Google), SpeedInvest, Antler, and Notion Capital, plus notable angels like Tom Blomfield (Monzo).
It’s a hugely exciting time to be joining the team as we’re still small enough that you’ll have a significant impact on the company’s growth trajectory and culture, yet large enough to have a great structure, experienced leaders and world-class benefits in place. More on working at Sona here.
About the Role
As our newest Engineering Manager, you’ll lead our AI team who working on the products that use AI (both LLMs and ML forecasting) to truly differentiate Sona from the legacy competitors in our space.
While engineering managers at Sona stay hands-on with technical decision-making and product discussions, your key focuses will be; driving a world class delivery process across our teams, removing blockers to our engineers delivering value to our customers, and empowering them to become Sona's future leaders as we continue to grow.
We fundamentally believe that the best products are built when small, cross functional, autonomous teams are empowered to solve business problems as they see fit. Everything starts with our customers and our engineers (and wider Product team) work closely with our Customer team and users themselves to ensure we’re building a product that fits our users needs. Our Product team principles give more of a flavour of how we like to work day-to-day.
Our stack is built primarily around Elixir, with a Phoenix LiveView web frontend (PETAL stack) and a GraphQL API for communicating with our React Native mobile app.
We're also huge fans of agentic coding and believe in its ability to dramatically increase our leverage. We especially love tools like Aider and believe they can add huge value across engineering, product and design. If you've got experience working with similar tools, we'd love to hear about it!
Responsibilities
Day to day, you will be:
Leading and growing a high performing engineering team
Championing high technical standards across our team
Driving continuous improvements to your team’s delivery process
Building deep understanding of our product and user needs
Collaborating with our Product Managers to prioritise roadmaps and understand the ‘why’ behind feature requests
Work towards owning P&L for your team
Requirements
Everybody’s different, but a lot of the following probably applies to you:
You're an experienced leader of engineering teams and have strong opinions on how to empower them to build the best possible products
You're used to the challenges of high-growth companies and can point to examples of helping quickly-scaling teams and businesses to improve their engineering delivery processes
Ideally, you have some professional experience building software in Elixir and at least a strong interest in what can be achieved by utilising AI in products - though these aren't essential if you're used to quickly upskilling on new tech
You're a believer in AI coding tools and have examples of how they've helped you improve your own work over the last year or so
You’re in a country which is GMT +/- 3 and fluent communicating both verbally and in writing in English
You’re able to attend in-person company meetups 2-3 times per year, these will be around 4 days long and usually require flying both in and outside of Europe
Benefits
Salary: £110k-130k (or local currency equivalent)
Full remote and flexible working
Share options
35 days annual leave (25 days standard plus 10 flexible public holiday days)
Extra day of leave for every year of service
Pension contributions matched up to 5%
Comprehensive health insurance
Enhanced parental leave & pay
Co-working space stipend for those based outside London
Bi-annual all expenses paid team retreats
The latest Macbook and equipment budget for your home office
Professional development budget
Unlimited free books
Note: this represents a typical benefits package for a UK-based, full-time employee. Exact details may vary based on location and employment type but we try to be as fair as possible to all of our team members. Please ask your contact in the Talent team to clarify the available benefits for you.
Top Skills
What We Do
The employee empowerment revolution has arrived. Sona is the modern app for the new era of frontline work, combining powerful productivity tools with a sleek, simple and intuitive user experience.
Empower your people to see their schedule at a glance, book holiday from anywhere, pick up extra shifts, communicate with colleagues, find information and give feedback instantly.
Empower your managers to slash admin time by 5 hours per week, drastically reduce agency and payroll spending, and elevate your employee experience.
Sona is transforming the way trailblazing organisations across health and social care, retail, logistics, charities and non-profits manage their teams and budgets and engage and retain their staff.
