Head Of Dev, Tech & Product

Dear Incoming Head of Dev, Tech & Product, YourTango,

Welcome to our amazing team! We are grateful that we found someone exceptional to lead, nurture, and enhance all facets of our digital dev, tech, and product operations.

I am excited to get to know and work successfully with you, along with the rest of the incredible leadership and dev team here at YourTango!

We are a leading, independent publisher whose passionate purpose is to help millions of people improve and thrive in their relationships, experience more love and empowerment in their lives, becoming happier and healthier, as a result. 

With a global audience of ~70mm readers, viewers and listeners per month, YourTango has been a trail blazer for nearly two decades, building a small empire around love, relationships and empowerment, filling critical white space in the wellness category. We are excited to continue to invest in our growth and impact.

Your leadership, as our head of Dev, Tech & Product, is going to be critical to helping YourTango achieve our vast growth ambitions and our desire to positively impact innumerable lives, including helping us future-proof our enterprise, and, critically, endear ourselves to millions of “raving super fans”!

You will oversee our extremely talented development, tech and product team, providing strategic direction and operational management, impacting all facets of our web operations and site performance. Your role works closely with our commercial teams, aligning technical solutions with business objectives, ensuring we remain at the forefront of digital publishing and marketing technologies, and playing a direct role in the company’s strategic planning.

You are a key member of our leadership team with touchpoints across the organization and a primary driver of facilitating all departments with providing our users outstanding underlying and forward-facing experiences. 

As critical criteria, you have held a head/director of web dev or engineering position at a digital publishing company; have expertise specifically on the back end and a depth of technical proficiency in seo.

As a performance, process and outcome-centric executive, you have the following responsibilities here at YourTango:

  • Lead and supervise all individuals and facets of the development, engineering and product team, ensuring alignment with company goals and commercial directives.
  • Manage development processes, from planning and execution to delivery, while fostering collaboration with development engineers.
  • Architect and oversee scalable, reliable, and secure solutions across the YourTango platform.
  • Maintain and improve technical infrastructure, including integration and optimization of AWS, Google Cloud, and related platforms.
  • Drive performance optimization for web technologies, including Drupal 10 CMS, CDNs (e.g., Fastly), and SEO best practices.
  • Ensure effective utilization of WebEngage for newsletter operations, personalization, delivery and user engagement.
  • Oversee data infrastructure, including the Google Cloud Datalake, ensuring robust data pipelines and reporting capabilities with Google Data Studio.
  • Collaborate with our ad operations team and strategic programmatic advertising stack partner to implement ongoing optimizations
  • Act as a technology liaison between the engineering and product team and commercial stakeholders to prioritize and deliver projects on time.
  • Maintain a dynamic balance of speed/quality/future scalability and determining associated thresholds to minimize technical debt

I am hoping that you have most or all of the following qualifications and experiences, having worked at another consumer-facing (B2C) digital publisher, including these so-called hard skills:

  • Bachelor's degree (Master’s is a plus) in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
  • 8+ years of experience in engineering leadership roles, primarily within digital media or publishing.
  • Strong expertise in AWS, Google Cloud, and ideally personalization and AI solutions
  • Proficiency in CMS platforms (preferably Drupal 10 & Wordpress), CDNs (preferably Fastly), and associated technologies inherent to digital publishing.
  • Expert level knowledge of SEO best practices. Strong preference for deep experience with driving SEO for content focused websites.
  • Solid understanding of web services, APIs, and programmatic advertising stacks.
  • An outstanding and proven ability to analyze data to test hypotheses and make data-drive decisions, including proficiency using analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Parsely, Google Data Studio and data-driven decision-making tools and frameworks.
  • Proven track record of managing engineering and product/ux teams and delivering high-quality solutions in a fast-paced environment.
  • Knowledge of agile methodologies and modern software development lifecycle tools.
  • AI tools and application of transformer / RAG technologies in online publishing platforms.

And ideally you possess most or all of these super valuable and important “soft” skills, ie you are or possess:

  • Extremely outcome driven. You get things done and are conscientious about setting and meeting deadlines.
  • Comfortable working with cross-functional teams, including advertising, design, newsletter, marketing and editorial teams.
  • Outstanding problem solving skills. You know things will go wrong or not exactly as planned and don’t stress when this happens; instead, you are ready to dig in and propose solutions.
  • Very organized and process-driven.
  • Deeply curious for how to improve workflows, understand what the data says and what will improve performance and delight our users.
  • Excellent skills in listening, communicating, collaborating, synthesizing information and making recommendations and/or taking action as needed.
  • A deep sense of accountability for your work and team: you naturally take initiative and feel a true sense of ownership. 
  • A strong work ethic. Scrappiness and an entrepreneurial spirit are also a big pluses here at YourTango!
  • An amazing attitude - including sincere emotional intelligence and the ability to have your ideas or opinions challenged without taking it personally but instead a chance to learn, grow and achieve success!
  • A propensity for the details: you are comfortable slowing down and really digging in to get to the best solutions and decisions - vs. checking boxes.
  • A heartfelt interest in working closely, collaboratively and successfully with a team of people, including leading, mentoring and caring about those who report to you, ideally helping them all rise and thrive!

The compensation package for this role includes:

  • Competitive salary and opportunity for performance/bonus payments
  • 401K participation
  • Paid vacation, holidays and personal/sick days
  • 60% company-paid premiums for health insurance
  • Stock options in Tango Publishing
  • The opportunity to put your signature on a high growth, purpose-driven and successful publishing brand
  • A caring and unique work environment, including a collegial, supportive, empowering and stimulating corporate culture

There’s much more to say and share but I hope this gives you a great taste for what a unique opportunity this role represents!

I look forward to getting to know you, learning from you, working closely with you and giving you the latitude, encouragement and resources to FLY at YourTango and this next exciting step in your career.

If this sounds like your dream job and can’t wait to get started, please reach out to us!

Michael is running this process for our team. He would appreciate getting a short letter stating your interest, including your comp requirements and resume. We’ll go from there.

Thank you for your consideration!

xo Andrea Miller

CEO & Founder, YourTango


PS: You’re still reading?! Great!! Here’s a little more that, I hope, is even more energizing for you!!

You’re part of a genuinely outstanding team - some members sincerely refer to us as the Best Team Ever - that genuinely needs YOU to help us get to the next level.

Purpose-driven and profitable, YourTango has reached an amazing inflection point and is poised for take off. Our history as a truly independent (plus female-founded and led) media company has defied the odds at every step of our incredible journey. Here are a few more notes on our mission and ethos:

  • Assembling an incredible foundation (one that features a vast content archive, technical superiority, tremendous distribution, etc, around themes of vital importance and value) that is poised to have monumental value unlocked - including with video, commerce, thought leadership, increased user engagement, scaling our healing and helping Experts platform, initiating a series of events, launching a podcast, building significant brand awareness and so much more.
  • Establishing a unique, profoundly impactful media brand that is making a positive impact in the world! YourTango opens readers’ hearts, builds relationships, and ignites positive change in millions of lives through compelling, actionable editorial. More on our mission here.
  • Last but not least, cultivating a team of professionals that care deeply about our work and each other. As a result, we have developed an empowering, caring culture replete with curiosity, purpose, problem-solving, appreciation, ownership, initiative, and more, where each of us regularly goes the extra mile - not because it’s mandated but because we care deeply about what we have built, our team, and how we are positively impacting the world around us. It’s profoundly gratifying to have worked with so many of these people the better part of the decade (& some much longer!) and to consider them close friends and partners.