Sr. Director, Engineering

Key Skills

Data science techniques, Design, DevOps, Effective communication skills, KPIs, Leadership Skill, Machine learning techniques, Product Management

Job Description

About the Role

As a Senior Director of Engineering at Highspot, you will inspire, lead, and grow a team of creative and talented core engineers who manage, scale, and invent the future of Highspot’s application platform. You’ll bring your deep technical expertise and proven people management skills to bear on strategic decisions about our technical ecosystem, department operations, team norms, and engineering culture. You’ll also be a key member of the broader Product leadership team and a key decision-maker within your product area.

What You'll Do

• Lead a team of engineers and managers, through whom you’ll execute on the strategic direction of the Highspot platform, inspiring and motivating teams to do their best work
• Effectively collaborate with key partners in your product area, including Product Managers, DevOps, TPMs, Security, Data Science, Services/Support, and BI
• Uphold and build upon Highspot’s culture, ensuring that Engineering is a welcoming, inclusive place, and that we not only meet our DE&I goals but lead Seattle’s tech industry with our commitment to diversity
• Bring your technical expertise to bear as you work closely with the Architects and Data Science teams to manage the evolution of Highspot’s platform; ensure that our architecture and stack are optimized to keep pace with the demands of hyper-growth; position all of Highspot’s products for continued high-availability and reliability across multiple worldwide data centers
• Deeply understand the importance of high availability and service reliability to Highspot’s strategic mission; leverage your expertise to define KPIs and growth plans for our core software infrastructure data platform
• Enable product engineers to reliably deliver products that maximizes product quality, security and reliability, including partnering with the DevOps team to build and maintain highly-observable systems with excellent metrics and actionable alerts
• Create a collaborative environment where all levels of engineers can contribute in meaningful ways
• Partner with the Services team to understand what drives customer joy across our product and ensure your team works to address customer concerns in a timely manner
• Partner with Architects team and CISO to design and implement proactive security postures for customer- and internal-facing systems
• Advocate for the tools, process, and resources the core dev team needs to enable their ongoing success and unlock their ability to innovate
• Mentor and guide the professional and technical development of the managers and engineers on your team
• Define clear roles and responsibilities that ensure efficient decision-making, careful analysis of trade-offs, and a responsible balance of strategic business objectives, unique customer needs, operational necessities, and product quality
• Ensure architects, stakeholders, and SMEs are appropriately involved in decisions
• Ensure decisions are communicated within and outside team
• Enforce accountability through empathetic, relevant, and objective performance targets and timely feedback and coaching
• Advise the broader Product leadership team on the relative costs and benefits of various projects competing for Engineering resources

Your Background

• Minimum of 10 years in the software development industry with a minimum of 5 years of experience working in senior engineering leadership roles, including managing Engineering Managers
• MS Degree or higher in Computer Science or related discipline, or equivalent experience
• Extensive experience developing and scaling cloud-native applications and infrastructure
• Proven success in attracting and retaining top engineering talent from diverse backgrounds
• Proven success as a partner and collaborator who prioritizes the success of the team over individual aspirations
• Entrepreneurial spirit, priding yourself on getting things done with a high level of quality
• Previous experience designing and building software products at scale
• Experience building and running a high-performance platform team that supports the needs of a complex product
• Experience designing and building highly-scalable data systems, search systems, and machine learning platforms is a plus, but not required

Equal Opportunity Statement

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of age, ancestry, citizenship, color, ethnicity, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or invisible disability status, political affiliation, veteran status, race, religion, or sexual orientation.