What role am I looking to hire?
I'm a department head, managing half a dozen developers across a bunch of domains (reporting from SQL->PowerBI, AI systems for OCR, internal tools sites, large-scale enterprise custom-tooled automations that run on our browser-based medical practice management system, research projects for medical journals, etc.), and I'm looking to hire... something, but I don't know what. (Not looking to recruit here, just learn a bit more about what the career and industry's terminology and role breakdowns are.)
I figure this post might help some people who want to know what small startups go through. We're a couple years in, and went from having absolutely no data to having a data warehouse of literally all of our systems with API connectors regularly pulling in data diffs on a continuous basis. Small company growing fast, and what I have are basically 5 developers and a DBA doing a ton of various projects. I need:
QA/Branch Management (I test all of my people's work manually before merging into staging->prod, unsustainable)
Automated Testing (Most of my people are basic and straight out of college and need to write more sustainable tests and turn them into more organized devs - the company, of course, is a "GO GO RUSH" company and I have to constantly fight back to beg for time to make our ecosystem maintainable)
Sprint Management (weekly sprints, if you're organized enough that I can tell what you're doing from a project list and sprint board, I don't need to meet with you, and that's my desire for all people)
Request Intake Management (We're switching ticketing systems this month and need to build out a proper intake process, "email me your problems" is not a sustainable solution)
What kind of role/salary is this looking like? My HR department kind of sucks at technical listings, and I do too, so I'm wondering if anyone has any advice.
Thank you!
Posted Dec 1, 2025, 6:52 PM UTC