Role Overview:

We are looking for a hands-on Director of Engineering to lead the design, development, and scaling of AI-first products and platforms. This role combines engineering leadership, technical architecture, AI-driven product development, and cross-functional collaboration to deliver scalable, intelligent software solutions.

The ideal candidate is a builder at heartsomeone who enjoys solving complex engineering challenges, writing and reviewing code, making architectural decisions, and leading teams that deliver production-ready AI systems. This is a high-impact leadership role with significant influence on product direction, engineering strategy, and organizational growth.

Key Responsibilities:

1. AI-First Product Engineering:

- Drive AI-first thinking across product development, workflows, and customer experiences.

- Lead the adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), AI agents, and intelligent automation across products and internal platforms.

- Evaluate emerging AI technologies and make strategic build-versus-buy decisions.

- Ensure responsible AI implementation with a focus on privacy, reliability, governance, and trust.

2. Engineering Architecture:

- Own the end-to-end architecture across backend, frontend, mobile, cloud, and AI components.

- Design scalable, modular, and resilient software systems capable of supporting rapid business growth.

- Conduct architecture and code reviews to ensure performance, scalability, security, and maintainability.

- Balance rapid product delivery with long-term technical excellence.

3. Infrastructure & Platform Engineering:

- Lead cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and platform reliability.

- Optimize cloud environments for scalability, performance, and cost efficiency.

- Establish engineering best practices around CI/CD, monitoring, logging, observability, and security.

- Ensure production readiness of AI applications through testing, guardrails, fallback mechanisms, and evaluation frameworks.

4. Engineering Leadership:

- Build, mentor, and lead a high-performing engineering organization.

- Establish engineering standards, development processes, and quality benchmarks.

- Promote adoption of AI-powered engineering tools to improve developer productivity.

- Recruit and develop engineers with strong software engineering and AI capabilities.

5. Cross-functional Collaboration:

- Partner closely with Product Management, Design, Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams.

- Translate business objectives into scalable technical solutions.

- Clearly communicate technical trade-offs, risks, and architectural decisions to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

- Contribute to product roadmap planning and execution.

6. Business & Operational Leadership:

- Understand the complete lifecycle of AI-driven products, from development through go-to-market and customer success.

- Participate in technology strategy, vendor evaluation, cloud optimization, and engineering investment decisions.

- Operate with an ownership mindset, contributing beyond engineering to overall business success.

Required Qualifications:

- 10+ years of software engineering experience with progressive technical leadership responsibilities.

- Experience working across both startup and enterprise environments.

- Strong hands-on expertise in backend or full-stack software development.

- Proven experience building and scaling products within a Series A or Series B startup.

- Experience designing and deploying AI-powered applications and intelligent automation platforms.

- Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, DevOps, CI/CD, and production systems.

- Experience with modern software architecture, distributed systems, and scalable platform engineering.

- Excellent communication, leadership, and stakeholder management skills.

- Ability to thrive in fast-paced, high-growth environments with a strong execution mindset.

Preferred Skills:

- AI Product Development, Large Language Models (LLMs), AI Agents, Generative AI, Machine Learning, MLOps, AWS Cloud, Microservices, Distributed Systems, DevOps & CI/CD, Cloud Architecture, Full Stack Development, Backend Engineering, React.js / Modern Frontend Frameworks, Python, Go, Java, or Node.js, Docker & Kubernetes, API Design, Observability & Monitoring, System Design, Engineering Leadership, Product Engineering, Agile Development, Technical Strategy.

What You'll Bring:

- A builder's mindset with a passion for creating scalable, production-ready AI products.

- Strong technical depth combined with exceptional leadership and execution skills.

- The ability to bridge business strategy and engineering execution.

- A pragmatic approach to solving complex technical problems while maintaining high engineering standards.

- A belief that AI is a foundational capability that should be embedded into products, platforms, and engineering workflows.