AppFolio is a technology leader powering the future of the real estate industry. The Director of Engineering, Developer Productivity will manage a platform engineering organization, driving the delivery of internal developer platforms and tools while contributing to the engineering strategy.
Responsibilities:
- Set the technical direction for the Internal Developer Platform, ensuring seamless "Golden Paths" for developers across distributed microservices
- Oversee the engineering of the Front-End Service Layer (FSL), ensuring a unified, high-performance UI framework and component library that bridges the gap between design and production
- Act as the primary technical counterpart for SRE and Security teams, translating reliability and compliance requirements into automated, invisible guardrails within the developer workflow
- Build automated Deployment and Delivery frameworks that enable high-confidence releases through canary deployments, blue-green shifts, and automated rollbacks
- Partner with InfoSec and SRE to ensure all delivery pipelines adhere to SOC 2, secure supply chain standards (SLSA), and automated vulnerability scanning
- Advocate for a SMART codebase (Simple, Maintainable, Agile, Refactored, and Tested) to deliver a SAFE platform (Secure, Available, Fast, and Easy)
- Drive the strategy for integrating AI/ML models into the developer workflow to identify flaky tests, suggest code optimizations, and automate complex infrastructure-as-code (IaC) migrations that manual efforts miss
- Recruit, screen, and close high-caliber engineering talent, scaling three distinct current teams: Deployment/Delivery, Front-End Service Layer, and CI/Dev Tooling
- Lead, coach, and support a team of passionate platform engineers, creating an environment of creativity and speed while maintaining the discipline required for foundational infrastructure
- Instill a sense of Product Ownership over the developer experience, ensuring the team treats internal developers as Tier-1 customers
- Build trusting relationships with Product Management and SRE teams to align platform resources with company strategy, balancing immediate developer needs with long-term architectural investments
Requirements:
- BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related technical discipline
- 8+ years of hands-on software development experience building enterprise SaaS or cloud-based platforms
- 5+ years of demonstrated success hiring, managing, and retaining world-class engineering teams
- Proven track record leading platform or 'Engineering Excellence' teams during a transition to hyper-growth
- Experience building proprietary CI/CD platforms (e.g., ArgoCD, or custom GitHub Actions orchestration) and internal developer portals (e.g., Backstage)
- Deep understanding of Build Systems (e.g. Bazel) and Test Automation strategies for large-scale distributed systems
- Working knowledge of infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and containerized workflows
- Strong grasp of frontend architecture, design system integration, and the challenges of scaling front-end service layers
- Demonstrated ability to design 'self-healing' pipelines that maintain 99.999% platform availability for the engineering org
- Experience partnering with Data Science to operationalize AI-assisted engineering tools (LLM-based coding assistants, automated observability) within the internal toolchain
- Diverse technical background with in depth experience across a range of architectures and technologies. Hands-on experience with all layers of the stack from infrastructure, persistence, backend, frontend, observability, etc for products at scale
- Recent experience using Agile methodologies and a deep understanding of Release Management workflows
- Exceptional interpersonal skills with a proven ability to build productive cross-departmental relationships (SRE, Security, Product)
- Treat engineers as customers. Build a deep understanding of developer pain points through continuous listening (interviews, shadowing, telemetry) and translate that into a prioritized roadmap
- Start from the developer experience and work backwards. Define success in terms of measurable improvements to engineer flow, reliability, and time-to-value
- Be the voice of engineering. Advocate for platform/productivity investments with clear ROI, tying improvements to delivery speed, quality, and operational excellence
- Build trust through responsiveness. Run tight feedback loops, publish what you heard, what you shipped, and what's next—so teams see their input reflected in outcomes
- Reduce toil relentlessly. Identify repetitive work and eliminate it via tooling, automation, paved roads, and self-service
- Experience with GetDX, JellyFish, or other developer metrics used to continuously improve the developer experience and productivity