Senior Director, Engineering

Role Overview

• We're sharpening focus. Essentials is our foundational pay equity and pay analytics platform — the one most of our customers use every day, the platform that anchors our customer relationships, and what funds the company. It deserves a dedicated owner.
• This person will own the platform that defines Syndio for the majority of our customers today: the analyses, the workflows, and the Data Hub that ingests and reconciles HR and compensation data for every customer we serve. Essentials is what funds the company, anchors our customer relationships, and earns us the right to build everything that comes next.
• The mandate is clear. Keep Essentials sharp, fast, and reliable. Modernize it for the AI-native future. Make it the platform our customers tell us they wish more of their software felt like.
• Multiple engineering teams across the Essentials product surface, including Data Hub. You'll inherit strong managers and engineers who have been delivering — your job is to give them an even sharper edge.
• Roadmap and delivery. End-to-end ownership of what ships, when, and at what quality bar. Partner closely with product, GTM, and customer success so the cadence is something the whole company can plan against.
• Platform modernization. Drive AI-augmented engineering practices, agent-friendly architecture, and tighter customer feedback loops. Make speed and quality compound — not trade off against each other.
• Customer outcomes. Reduce time-to-value for new customers. Reduce friction for existing ones. Make the platform stickier with every release.
• Cross-functional partnership. Work shoulder-to-shoulder with peer engineering and product leaders across the company. Workstreams reinforce each other; they don't compete.
• Hiring, leveling, and growth. Build a team that delivers at our standard, develops people, and raises the bar with every hire.

Requirements

• You've owned a multi-team, customer-facing engineering organization at meaningful scale, ideally in B2B SaaS serving enterprise customers.
• You've shipped, repeatedly. Track record of getting product out the door and improving while running — not in long planning cycles disconnected from customer reality.
• You think in systems and outcomes, not tickets. You can hold a roadmap, a budget, and a team, and you don't lose the customer in the middle of it.
• You're an AI-native operator. You've actually used modern AI tooling to change how your team builds — not just talked about it. You see this as table stakes, not a curiosity.
• You partner well with product and GTM. You know how to stand up a delivery rhythm that makes sales, CS, and marketing predictable.
• You're direct, candid, and high-trust. You push back when something's off. You don't sugarcoat. You expect the same from your team.
• You believe in crawl, walk, run. Bias to action and learning over perfect plans built in a vacuum.
• Extra Credit
• Experience in HR tech, compensation systems, HRIS integrations, or pay equity / pay analytics.
• Background scaling a data-heavy platform — ingestion, normalization, customer-specific schemas, multi-tenant data modeling.
• Have led an established product through a meaningful re-platforming or AI-native rebuild.

Benefits

• Competitive Compensation. For this role our salary is targeted at $238,000-$280,000 per year. Final offer amounts are determined by factors such as experience and expertise. We take a geo neutral approach to compensation within the US, meaning that we pay based on job function and level, not location.
• Syndio Equity. So you can share in Syndio’s success.
• Flexible Vacation Policy. We encourage our team to recharge when they need to, plus paid sick & safe time, compassion leave, and voting leave.
• Paid parental leave
• Medical, Dental, Vision. Syndio pays 90% of employee premiums, and 50% for dependents.
• Life Insurance & Disability. Syndio covers the full premium.
• 401(k). To help you save for your future
• Fully remote model
• #LI-Remote