Director - Engineering

About the client

Our client is a seed-stage AI graphic design platform, founded by former agency owners with over 20 years of experience. They move fast, operating at the cutting edge and leveraging the latest AI technologies to shape the future of brand design.

About the role

They are seeking a Director of Engineering to lead their engineering operations, driving the development of their Alpha product through to general release.

The ideal candidate will bring deep software development expertise and strong business acumen to help shape their technology, product, and company vision. You should be confident leading and scaling a growing team of full-time and freelance engineers, with proven experience at an early-stage SaaS company taking a product from 0 to 1.

This is a hands-on leadership role that spans engineering management, technical architecture, recruiting, and coding. You'll also collaborate closely with their Head of Machine Learning to bring cutting-edge AI capabilities into the product.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with the company's founders to define and drive a roadmap of priorities for Engineering.
• Lead technical design sessions and make decisions that strike the right balance between technical robustness, flexibility, product quality, security considerations, and project timelines.
• Be responsible for the entire development life cycle of all engineering projects.
• Own the design and implementation of key system components and product features
• Drive reuse of development work, platforming, and consistent technical and architectural direction across projects.
• Implement robust guidelines and processes for software development, code reviews, continuous integration, testing, and deployment to ensure high code quality and system stability.
• Identify and remediate any roadblocks that prevent Engineering team members from doing their best work.
• Practice Agility and help the Team focus on creating high-value increments that meet the Definition of Done.
• Responsible for inspiring, hiring, onboarding, and mentoring a diverse remote team of engineering professionals.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to distill complex issues, their business impact, and options for the executive team.
• Strategically, help define the future of the organization, and identify industry trends and practices that, when adopted, will dramatically accelerate team performance and increase organizational capability.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience leading engineering teams building distributed SaaS platforms hosting on native and hybrid Cloud.
• 8+ years experience as a software development engineer in front-end and/or back-end services.
• Knowledge of microservice and multi-tier architectures across technology stacks: React, Java, Python, Node.js, Web servers, Kafka, RDBMS/NoSQL.
• Proven ability to lead in a fast-moving, team-oriented, collaborative start-up environment.
• Hands-on experience working with Agile teams, including Scrum.
• Experience leading and growing geographically diverse engineering teams in today's remote-first work environment.
• BS degree in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent. Strong technical foundation in software engineering and design principles.
• Leadership abilities with a strategic mind.
• Excellent project management skills.

Bonus Points

• DevOps expertise: CI/CD pipeline, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes.
• Experience designing and building Data lake for growth and scale on the AWS Cloud.
• Experience working on design tools.
• Experience working within a creative organisation.
• Familiar with procedural animation, character controllers, and image/animation compression.

Other

• Must be based in HCM
• Salary and equity compensation
• Health, vision, and dental benefits