Role description
EstuaryLevel: Director. Location: Remote US. Reports to: CTO. What’s the role: Own the engineering function—strategy, people, delivery, and operations—partnering with the founder CTO. Scope spans streaming runtime/control plane, hundreds of integrations, transformation/SQL surfaces, and growing AI capabilities. Grow leaders, design the org ahead of need, and be accountable for delivery and quality. Emphasize leverage via tooling, ownership, and a high hiring bar; build a formidable, compact team. What you’ll do: Own engineering roadmap and execution; set technical strategy with CTO (build vs buy, investments, architectural bets); grow leaders and build management practice; design org and ownership boundaries ahead of scale; represent engineering to co-founders and go-to-market/compliance/support; own reliability as a business outcome (SLOs, fix-bugs-first culture); drive operational excellence (quality, process, developer experience, security/compliance posture); run the hiring engine; stay close to technical work. Qualifications: 8+ years building software; 4+ years leading teams, including managers of managers. Owned an engineering function (20–50 engineers) with demonstrable leverage. Track record developing engineering leaders. Depth in data-intensive systems and ability to converse across a broad stack. Proven ability to introduce structure and nurture excellence across multiple teams, preferably B2B; can inherit and evolve a functioning org. Partnered productively with founders/CTOs on strategy. Comfort spanning infra and user-facing product and setting priorities. Communicate at all levels up to customers/board. Led incident response in high-stakes settings. How we work: High autonomy; remote-first; global team skewed to east-coast hours. Compensation & leveling: Market‑competitive cash + equity.