Director, Engineering

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Director, Engineering based in the United States. This is a senior engineering leadership role responsible for the architecture, delivery, and roadmap of a product engineering organization. You will lead teams toward faster, more predictable delivery while maintaining strong standards for reliability and software quality. The role combines organizational design, engineering management, technical judgment, and close partnership with Product leadership. A major focus will be building an AI-enabled engineering organization and measuring its impact on how teams work and deliver. You will establish clear ownership, effective team structures, and delivery practices that support measurable business outcomes. The environment includes complex, revenue-generating systems, high-availability hosting platforms, and long-lived technology estates. This is an opportunity to shape both the engineering organization and the systems that support a large-scale cloud and hosting business.

Engineering strategy and delivery: Own architecture, delivery, and engineering roadmaps across product engineering teams, partnering closely with Product to shape priorities, establish commitments, and deliver measurable value. Predictable delivery: Operate teams on defined monthly delivery cycles with clear scope and cut lines, using evidence and delivery metrics to improve reliability and accountability. Engineering performance: Establish and improve DORA metrics, software quality practices, observability, service levels, testing, trunk-based development, feature flags, and incident management. Organization design: Design effective team boundaries and ownership models so teams can independently complete their work while maintaining clear accountability for every area of delivery. Engineering management: Hire, develop, coach, and calibrate Engineering Managers, maintain a strong hiring bar, and build a capable management bench. Technical leadership: Provide hands-on technical direction without needing to own implementation, reviewing designs and changes and making defensible architectural and engineering decisions. AI-enabled engineering: Drive practical adoption of agentic development tools, specification-first workflows, automated review, reusable engineering skills, and governance around permissions, quotas, security, and cost. Modernization: Lead complex software modernization across long-lived systems, using approaches such as API-based strangler patterns, characterization testing, event-driven architectures, and carefully selected systems of record. Revenue-critical systems: Oversee modernization and consolidation of billing and payment platforms, including dual-run approaches, financial reconciliation, and tested rollback strategies. Hosting platform leadership: Guide engineering across hosting and commerce technologies, including control panels, WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, Shopware, Linux infrastructure, and major platform migrations. Security: Embed secure development practices into AI-assisted engineering workflows, including secrets management, push protection, static analysis, supply-chain controls, and defenses against prompt injection. Stakeholder leadership: Work with senior stakeholders to reassess scope, timelines, technical trade-offs, and business consequences while maintaining accountability for production availability and delivery outcomes. Remote and distributed teams: Lead engineering teams across time zones, including vendor-supported teams, while establishing clear operating agreements and accountability. Requirements Engineering leadership: 12+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 5 years leading engineering teams and experience managing Engineering Managers. Organizational impact: Demonstrated experience making an engineering organization measurably faster, with hands-on experience instrumenting and improving DORA or equivalent delivery metrics. AI-native engineering: Significant hands-on experience using AI-assisted and agentic coding tools at organizational scale, including designing or operating reusable harnesses, shared skills, repository instructions, tool connectors, permission boundaries, and automated review workflows. Delivery expertise: Strong understanding of modern software delivery practices, including automated testing, coverage gates, trunk-based development, feature flags, observability, service levels, centralized intake, and structured incident management. Technical judgment: Ability to review architecture and code changes, assess technical trade-offs, and establish a defensible technical position without needing to personally implement every solution. Complex systems: Experience leading modernization of large or long-lived software systems, including legacy Perl and PHP environments, API gateways, identity systems, event-driven architectures, and systems-of-record decisions. High-availability operations: Proven experience operating production software with meaningful accountability for availability and reliability. Revenue systems: Experience with billing and payment platforms, including processor consolidation, dual-running systems, reconciliation, and rollback planning. Cloud and hosting: Experience managing a hosting, cloud, or other high-availability service business is required. Platform expertise: Familiarity with technologies such as cPanel, InterWorx, WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, Shopware, Linux, VMware, and Nutanix is valuable. Security: Strong understanding of secure software development, secrets hygiene, static analysis, tool and connector supply-chain security, and security risks associated with AI-assisted development. People leadership: Demonstrated ability to build teams, establish ownership structures, hire against a clear standard, develop managers, and lead distributed teams across time zones. Business partnership: Strong ability to connect engineering priorities with business objectives and communicate technical risks, trade-offs, and outcomes to senior stakeholders. Benefits Remote work: Fully remote position within the United States. Leadership impact: Opportunity to shape engineering strategy, organizational structure, delivery practices, and AI adoption at scale. Technical scope: Work across high-availability hosting platforms, revenue-critical systems, legacy modernization, cloud infrastructure, and modern AI-assisted engineering. Organizational ownership: Direct influence over engineering roadmaps, team structures, management development, hiring standards, and delivery performance. Collaborative environment: Close partnership with Product and senior business stakeholders to connect engineering execution with organizational priorities. Professional growth: Opportunity to lead complex transformation initiatives while developing engineering managers and distributed teams. Equal opportunity: Commitment to equal employment opportunity without regard to legally protected characteristics.

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