Jack Rhodes

Jack Rhodes

Engineering Manager, building the platform for modern apprenticeships at Multiverse.

Jack Rhodes is an Engineering Manager at Multiverse; an EdTech aiming to create a diverse group of future leaders through professional apprenticeships.

Previously a Senior Engineer at IBM iX, Jack helped clients including the NHS, HSBC, Boots, and London Fashion Week build beautiful performant web apps. In 2021, he joined Multiverse as a Senior Engineer to dive into education technology, moving across to Engineering Management in 2022 to help scale their team.

Outside work, he’s a keen chef, okayish climber, and a very average guitarist.

Talk:
From Start-up to Unicorn: Scaling Teams, Impact, and Education with Elixir at Multiverse

As an education business aiming to provide an alternative to university through professional apprenticeships, Multiverse has been running on Elixir since 2016. The past two years have seen our engineering team grow 6X from 10 to 60 engineers, and counting!

That kind of growth is demanding at the best of times, but adding the factor of building our apps with Elixir presented a special challenge for us as engineering managers looking to sustainably grow an effective, happy team around a niche programming language.

In this talk, Jack Rhodes, an Engineering Manager at Multiverse gives insights into the challenges they faced in growing their team, how they sought to overcome them, and the lessons they’ve learnt along the way.

Talk objectives:

  • The talk aims to cover our experience of scaling an engineering organisation around Elixir; hiring, training, decision making, and planning for the future.
  • We hope that by sharing our experience, we can help others make informed decisions about using Elixir and provide some valuable insights into building an engineering team with this powerful and efficient language.

Target audience:

  • This talk is aimed at anyone interested in the realities of hyper growth, the tradeoffs you make choosing a language with a small (but awesome) community, and what we learned on our journey.