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RStudio creates great software that helps people understand data and make better decisions in real-world applications. Our core offering is an open source data science platform, and we aim to make it available to everyone, regardless of their economic means. Together, RStudio’s open-source software and commercial software form a virtuous cycle: The adoption of open-source data science software at scale in organizations creates demand for RStudio’s commercial software; and the revenue from commercial software, in turn, enables deeper investment in the open-source software that benefits everyone.
The goals of the Open Source group are not only to provide a seamless end-to-end data science experience, but also to help users learn and flourish. We value kindness, humility, openness, and resourcefulness in our work and interactions with the community and each other. To date, the open source R teams (mlverse, rmarkdown, Shiny, tidymodels, tidyverse, and vetiver) have existed largely independently, each led by a technical expert. As the number of open source engineers has increased, our relatively informal existing structure has started to show its weaknesses and we’re looking for an engineering leader to help us grow with confidence. You will work hand in hand with our Chief Scientist, our CTO, our other technical leads, and our program director to ensure that our open source engineers continue to flourish as we grow.
This role has the potential to have a substantial impact on the practice of data science. Across our open source teams, we develop hundreds of R packages including some of the most popular packages in the R ecosystem, like dplyr, ggplot2, shiny, rmarkdown, and tidymodels, which are collectively used by millions of people each year.
People: You will work hand in hand with team leads and be responsible for managing a small team of your own (mostly developers working on new initiatives that haven’t yet grown a team and team leads). You will coach and mentor your reports to become better software developers, helping work through technical challenges, build processes for repeated tasks, and encourage and support them in expanding their skillsets. You will play a key role in hiring; we expect you to care deeply about diversity, and be excited to develop initiatives that will expand the pool of skilled R users.
Developers in our open source teams have high autonomy and need little day-to-day management. We are not looking for someone to build a factory with a fully automated and scalable process for delivering software; we want to develop a guild of craftspeople who share process and ideas, but work independently, each owning a complete product.
Communication: Because our open source developers work so independently, it’s sometimes hard to get a high-level view of everything we’re working on. We need you to help us improve our reporting and cross-team communication so that we can better articulate a shared vision within the team and better explain our current priorities to the rest of the company. You’ll also help coordinate projects that cross our open source and commercial teams, helping us provide a polished end-to-end experience for our commercial customers.
Product: Our goal is to deliver seamless end-to-end experiences for all data scientists. While we’re well connected to pain experienced by our vocal twitter community, we hear less from industry data scientists. We want you to develop a systematic process for listening to all our users to make sure we’re not missing important pain points. As part of this, you’ll work closely with our solutions engineering, customer success, and product management teams to both learn product gaps and to execute solutions that require cross-team coordination.