[Hiring] Director of Engineering @First American

Role Description

Be part of a transformative engineering organization that is shaping how First American builds and delivers the AI-driven systems powering modern title production. We are looking for a Director of Engineering to own parts of First American's title automation strategy.

• Own the Data and Document Intelligence Platform
• Define and evolve the architecture for a production-grade document intelligence system that extracts, structures, and governs data from title insurance documents at scale.
• Own the platform that emits title production events to the data lake, decoupling operational systems from analytics.
• Lead the development and maintenance of the canonical data model for title production.
• Drive document classification programs, including expanding scope across new document types and geographies.
• Partner with data science and AI governance teams to maintain labeled training datasets, accuracy benchmarks, and evaluation standards.
• Scale AI-Powered Title Automation
• Own the engineering programs that expand First American's AI-driven title production platform — Sequoia.
• Lead automated generation of title search packages and related outputs.
• Define sequencing, investment tradeoffs, and measurable outcomes for automation programs.
• Set Technical Direction and AI-Ready Architecture
• Define architecture and engineering standards across document processing, event-driven data pipelines, and ML lifecycle.
• Build a governed, AI-ready data foundation.
• Set the domain's approach to responsible AI engineering.
• Drive technical build/buy/modernize decisions.
• Operate as a Product Owner and Cross-Functional Partner
• Partner with Product on customer needs, desired outcomes, and experience.
• Collaborate with Title Operations, Data Science, and peer engineering leaders.
• Build High-Performing, Distributed Engineering Teams
• Build an inclusive, psychologically safe environment.
• Lead through engineering managers.
• Own organizational health and talent outcomes.
• Drive Delivery and Modernization Excellence
• Own the domain roadmap and investment tradeoffs.
• Lead modernization of production data and document platforms.
• Own engineering capacity planning and transparent intake.
• Establish Operational Excellence and Cost Discipline
• Own operational standards across observability, service levels, and incident response.
• Enforce production-readiness guardrails for access control and data quality.
• Drive cost and performance discipline through metrics and automation.

Qualifications

• Experience owning the strategy, architecture, and operational outcomes of a large-scale production data or AI platform.
• Deep technical fluency in distributed data processing, data lakes, cloud data warehouses, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with document intelligence, unstructured data extraction, or ML-based data processing at production scale.
• Technical fluency in AI/ML lifecycle management.
• Strong understanding of cloud networking, identity and access, storage, and cloud-native services.
• Technical fluency in Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD.
• Experience modernizing complex data environments and migrating business-critical workloads.
• Strong architectural and vendor judgment.
• Experience shaping operating models and leading distributed teams.
• A record of setting technical strategy and delivering measurable business outcomes.
• Practical expertise in operational excellence, governance, security, data quality, and performance at scale.
• Excellent executive communication and change leadership.
• Inclusive leadership and a record of developing engineering managers.

Requirements

• Ideally, experience with modern lakehouse and cloud data warehouse platforms.
• Event-driven architectures and data pipeline design.
• Document intelligence, OCR, extraction models, and accuracy measurement.
• Designing or operating AI platforms that support data science and machine learning.
• Experience in highly regulated industries such as financial services, insurance, or real estate.

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, and 401k.
• PTO/paid sick leave and other great benefits like an employee stock purchase plan.

Company Description

First American is an equal opportunity employer in every sense of the term, fostering an authentic and inclusive workplace for all.