[Hiring] Director of Engineering @DRH Search

Role Description

We're assisting a well-funded startup in the edtech space with their search for a Director of Engineering. Their product is an AI-powered master scheduling platform for K-12 schools and districts. They are a remote first company and open to candidates from anywhere in the US, though East Coast time zone is preferred.

What you'll do:

• Strategic Technical Leadership
  • Partner with Product and broader cross-functional stakeholders to define squad goals and align engineering priorities against these goals.
  • Balance company and squad goals with business constraints to develop a staffing strategy for teams under your leadership.
  • Identify and advance key technical decisions impacting the squads’ abilities to efficiently deliver against their goals at high quality.
  • Work with your squads to multiply their impact through levers such as culture, process, tooling, and technology.
  • Own critical relationships with internal and external stakeholders who are enabling or dependent on the work of your squads.
• Production Quality & Availability
  • Establish practices on each squad and across the engineering organization that bake quality into our development process.
  • Encourage and facilitate continuous learning and improvement from production errors or incidents.
  • Raise the bar for the team around security, testing, and scaling practices.
  • Operate as the escalation point for major production issues while establishing processes and technology improvements that rarely require such escalation.
• Team Management and Growth
  • Directly recruit, hire, and manage team members across multiple squads.
  • By default, operate through your team to influence change and improvement in the strategic and tactical delivery of engineering value to the organization.
  • Own the retention and growth of team members, aligning growth to value delivered to the business and meeting expectations of roles.
  • Own performance management for the squad, delivering regular feedback and guidance for team members to meet and exceed expectations for their roles.
• Team Health
  • Ensure teams under your purview are operating at high velocity and with clarity on their goals.
  • Unblock the team on cross-team and cross-functional challenges that hinder delivering value. Ensure that each engineering squad member across your teams are collaborating effectively with other functions and teams.
  • Monitor and action on learnings from sprint retrospectives, project progress, and overall team reflections to continuously improve how your teams operate.
• Glue Factor
  • Directly take on hands-on ownership of challenging or critical needs when necessary, though biasing to empowering your team where possible.
  • Proactively identify and take action on opportunities for the overall engineering organization to improve.
  • Support team members through pairing, review, and other activities to accelerate and improve their decision-making.
  • Represent the team and organization in various settings internally and externally.

Qualifications

• Prior experience in technical leadership roles driving business, product and technical outcomes: tech lead, manager, director, etc.
• Hands-on development and design experience with demanding architectures (in terms of scale, security, and product considerations).
• Ability to onboard to a variety of tech stacks as needed. Ours consists of React, Python, AWS, MongoDB. We don’t expect exact overlap, but a demonstrated ability to onboard effectively.
• Successfully managed and scaled multiple teams and balanced your own impact in the process.
• Previously shepherded engineering organizations through major technical decisions, changes in scale, and maturation of technology platforms powering mission-critical products.
• Represented your organization and company in internal and external settings in high stakes conversations.
• Comfortable working in ambiguous, fast-paced environments (especially startups); proactive and solutions-oriented.
• Nice to have: prior experience or interest in educational technology products.
• Ownership mentality with a commitment to delivering exceptional results for customers.