Engineering Manager looking for a new place to thrive

Update: I found a new job but keeping this post for posterity 🙂

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Hi, I’m Kim Moir and I’m looking for a new role as an engineering manager.

My most recent roles are managing Platform Performance and the Developer Productivity teams. The teams I’ve managed have been remote and geographically distributed across several continents. I’ve managed interns, new graduates, senior engineers, staff engineers, and senior staff engineers.

For the past three years I’ve also mentored underrepresented people in tech both at my employer and in the community. I’ve also interviewed 50+ candidates for roles on my teams with a focus on hiring candidates with excellent technical, communication and mentoring skills.

I’m looking for a role as an engineering manager where I can work with a leader that prioritizes humane leadership and delivering projects on a reasonable schedule. I shine at empowering engineers to do their best work by providing clear goals, direct feedback, and implementing strategies to increase alignment. I thrive on improving collaboration and communication among teams. I excel at conducting difficult conversations to set expectations and move forward. My philosophy as a manager is that communication is just as important as code. I also appreciate working in a high trust environment.

It would be a bonus to conduct hiring to grow the size of the team.

If you’re a direct report on my team, it is my goal to have open and honest career conversations on a regular basis to allow you to grow in your role. I want to be able to help you set reasonable goals and celebrate when you reach them. I prioritize giving effective feedback, and will regularly ask you to give feedback to me on how I can be a better manager for you and the team. I like building an environment on a team with effective meetings, reasonable goals and where everyone’s voice can be heard and you feel welcome to share your ideas.

I’m not interested in a role where I will be the “only” in leadership, on the team or the c-level representation looks like this 🧔🏻‍♂️👴🏻👨🏻👩🏻👱🏻‍♂️👨🏻‍🦰 (overwhelming white men). I’m going to take a pass at an organization where leaders or engineers are allowed to continue to work there despite toxic behaviour because of “their valuable contributions” which ultimately drive others to leave the team or the company.

I’ve written and spoken extensively about open source software, release engineering at scale, leadership, and upgrading mission critical distributed systems. I’ve also facilitated manager knowledge sharing groups where groups of managers meet at a regular cadence to discuss leadership topics and learn from each other.

My background before management was as a Staff Release Engineer where I worked primarily in Python to improve the resiliency and throughput of large distributed build and release pipelines. As a lifelong learner, I’m excited to learn about the tech stack and challenges that your team is facing and how I can help the team make the right architectural decisions going forward.

You can read my LinkedIn profile to learn more. Please contact me via email at my firstname.lastname@gmail.com if you are interested in having a chat!

Location: Canada Remote or Ottawa, Ontario

Employment type: Full-time (including paid vacation time, sick leave and health care.) I will also check if you provide paid parental leave and trans inclusive health care because that is a signal me that you care about the well-being of your employees. If you are a US-based company please clarify the specifics of how you hire Canadians in your outreach.

Organization: Engineering

Caveats: I’m not interested in working at a FAANG, Shopify or in the crypto, fintech or ride/food delivery business.

References

Thanks to these blog posts by Alice Goldfuss, Adrienne Low and Julie Pagano for inspiring the format of this post.

I recently wrote about Interviewing for a new role as an engineering manager: Culture and Alignment.