Director, Engineering

Applause is a fast-growing tech startup seeking an experienced Director of Engineering to join their leadership team. In this critical management-focused role, you will lead the engineering team, recruit new talent, and drive product development and engineering excellence.

Responsibilities:

• Lead, mentor, and grow the engineering team across all functions (backend, frontend, mobile, DevOps, QA)
• Recruit, onboard, and retain exceptional engineering talent
• Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, ownership, and continuous improvement
• Conduct regular 1-on-1s, performance reviews, and provide coaching to develop future leaders
• Partner closely with Product leadership to translate the product roadmap into engineering deliverables
• Own sprint planning, resource allocation, and delivery timelines across all engineering initiatives
• Ensure predictable, reliable product releases with minimal bugs and strong quality assurance
• Drive alignment between engineering capacity and product priorities
• Establish and enforce code quality standards, testing practices, and peer review processes
• Implement CI/CD pipelines and development workflows that enable rapid, safe deployments
• Build quality assurance processes, including automated testing, code coverage, and monitoring
• Create technical documentation standards and knowledge-sharing practices
• Foster engineering best practices around system design, security, and performance optimization
• Collaborate with Lead Developer on technical vision and long-term technology strategy
• Make build vs. buy decisions and evaluate new technologies, frameworks, and tools
• Oversee infrastructure planning, capacity management, and cloud optimization
• Ensure system reliability, uptime, and performance meet SLA commitments
• Manage engineering budget and resource planning
• Implement metrics and KPIs to measure team productivity, quality, and velocity

Requirements:

• 8+ years in software engineering with 3+ years in engineering leadership roles (Manager or Director level)
• Proven track record of scaling engineering teams from 5-10 to 20-50+ engineers
• Experience managing managers and building organizational structures
• Demonstrated success delivering complex SaaS products in fast-paced startup environments
• Strong background in modern web app development and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Experience implementing engineering processes, standards, and best practices from the ground up
• Track record of successful collaboration with Product teams to execute roadmaps
• Detail-oriented with strong problem-solving abilities
• Very effective in a remote work environment
• Previous experience at a Series A or Series B SaaS company during hypergrowth (2-5x growth)
• Hands-on technical background with the ability to review architecture and code when needed
• Experience with modern tech stacks (React, Node.js, Python, Go, microservices, etc.)
• Experience with distributed teams or remote-first engineering cultures
• History of successful technical hiring and building talent pipelines