Director of engineering

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.

What you'll bring:

• Technical Experience: 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.
• Leadership Experience: 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.
• Other Qualities: 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.