Director Engineering

Key Responsibilities

Leadership & Team Management

• Lead and mentor a team of backend engineering managers and senior backend engineers.
  
• Build a high-performing engineering culture focused on ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
  
• Drive hiring, onboarding, performance management, and career development for backend engineering teams.
  

Technical Strategy & Architecture

• Define and execute the long-term backend architectural vision, ensuring scalability, resilience, and modernization.
  
• Guide build-vs-buy decisions, tech stack choices, and platform evolution.
  
• Review and oversee technical designs across teams, ensuring alignment with best practices and architectural goals.
  
• Champion observability, reliability, performance, and operational excellence.
  

Execution & Delivery

• Lead planning and execution of backend roadmap, ensuring timely and high-quality delivery.
  
• Improve engineering processes (CI/CD, code quality, testing, documentation) to accelerate velocity.
  
• Ensure SLA/SLO commitments and robust incident response processes.
  
• Collaborate with Product to define clear requirements, realistic timelines, and effective trade-offs.
  

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Security to enforce compliance and secure-by-design principles.
  
• Work closely with Infrastructure/Platform teams on cloud operations, cost optimization, and system reliability.
  
• Collaborate with Data, ML, Mobile, Frontend, and DevOps teams for cohesive end-to-end solutions.
  

Operational Excellence

• Drive KPIs for backend reliability (latency, availability, throughput).
  
• Implement best practices for distributed systems, microservices, API governance, and data management.
  
• Own the technical health of backend systemsmanage tech debt, plan migrations, and reduce operational risks.
  

Qualifications

Required

• 14+ years of backend engineering experience, with at least 4+ years managing managers and senior-level engineers.
  
• Proven track record designing and scaling large distributed systems or high-traffic backend platforms.
  
• Deep expertise with one or more backend languages (e.g., Go, Java, Python, Node.js, Rust).
  
• Strong knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), containers/orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines.
  
• Experience defining architectural standards and leading multi-team engineering initiatives.
  
• Excellent communication, leadership, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
  

Preferred

• Experience in a hyper-growth or large-scale SaaS environment.
  
• Strong background in API design, event-driven architectures, or microservices.
  
• Familiarity with distributed databases, caching strategies, and message queues.
  
• Experience with incident management, on-call practices, SRE principles, and observability tooling.
  
• Prior success building inclusive, diverse engineering organizations.