- Company Name
- Blue J
- Job Title
- Director of Engineering
- Job Description
-
**Job title**
Director of Engineering
**Role Summary**
Lead the evolution of a SaaS platform’s architecture, delivering high‑quality, scalable systems and driving engineering excellence across multiple teams.
**Expectations**
- Own the long‑term vision for platform reliability, scalability, developer experience, and speed of delivery.
- Coach senior engineers, sculpt technical strategy, and ensure high‑confidence, frequent releases.
- Negotiate architectural trade‑offs that balance short‑term velocity with long‑term maintainability.
**Key Responsibilities**
- Collaborate with product, engineering, and research leaders to set platform goals and priorities.
- Design and build foundational systems and internal tools; dive deeply into architecture and trade‑offs.
- Guide engineering teams through ambiguity, complex challenges, and technical debt remediation.
- Communicate plans, progress, and risks to stakeholders clearly.
- Hire, mentor, and develop high‑performing engineers; establish ownership, mandates, and interface clarity.
- Implement engineering best practices: quality, lean iteration, testing, and robust system design.
**Required Skills**
- 10+ years hands‑on experience designing distributed backend systems (service‑oriented, event‑driven).
- 5+ years leading software or data platform teams, growing and sustaining high‑performance groups.
- End‑to‑end ownership of complex systems: roadmap, design, implementation, and evolution.
- Expertise in data ingestion, transformation, indexing pipelines (streaming, retrieval workflows).
- Deep understanding of scalability, reliability, consistency, and cost trade‑offs in distributed environments.
- Proven ability to act as senior/staff IC when needed during early context building.
- Strong communication with technical and non‑technical audiences; facilitation of cross‑functional alignment.
- Experience guiding architectural decisions, refactors, and long‑term modernization initiatives.
- Bonus: familiarity with RAG pipelines, embeddings workflows, or large‑scale data systems.
**Required Education & Certifications**
- Bachelor’s (or higher) degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
- Optional certifications in distributed systems, cloud architecture, or relevant professional bodies.