Attentive is an AI marketing platform for 1:1 personalization redefining the way brands and people connect. The Director of Engineering will lead the Shopper Management organization, focusing on building a unified shopper data foundation and delivering actionable marketer-facing experiences.
Responsibilities:
- Set technical direction for the Shopper Management organization, spanning identity resolution, user profile, segmentation, products & offers, and CRM — ensuring these historically independent systems converge into a coherent, shopper-centric architecture
- Lead and grow an engineering organization across multiple sub-teams, hiring strong technical leaders, coaching managers, and building a culture of ownership and craft
- Drive the unified shopper technical strategy by evolving our cross-channel model that enables powerful personalization and attribution
- Build end-to-end data traceability and observability so that every system decision, from segment membership to message targeting, is explainable and auditable, laying the groundwork for client-facing insights
- Improve data quality and consistency across the platform, reconciling profiles with segmentation datasets, validating data integrations, and ensuring shopper data is standardized and accessible across all product surfaces
- Own the operational health of the domain, reducing support burden through better tooling, retiring legacy systems, and investing in automated quality detection and self-service debugging
- Partner with Product and Design to deliver marketer-facing experiences that make shopper data inspiring and usable, from segmentation tools to CRM interfaces and shopper profiles
- Accelerate developer velocity by investing in reliable dev/test environments, stable CI/CD, decoupled service architectures, clear system ownership, and agentic automation
- Collaborate cross-functionally with ML, messaging, analytics, and growth teams, whose systems depend on the shopper data foundation you maintain
Requirements:
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years leading engineering teams including managing managers
- Deep understanding of related data platform architectures: you've led teams building identity systems, customer data platforms, user profile stores, event pipelines, or segmentation engines at scale
- Familiarity with direct marketing and martech ecosystems: you understand how customer data flows from collection through activation, and you appreciate the nuances of CRM, audience building, and personalization
- Strong people-first leadership: you develop engineering managers and tech leads, create high-trust environments, and make the people around you better. You know that the best technical outcomes come from well-supported teams
- Experience operating large-scale data systems: comfort with technologies like Spark, Dynamo, Flink, Kafka, Snowflake, Clickhouse, and similar tools for real-time and batch data processing
- Product sensibility: you can partner effectively with Product and Design, translating business needs into technical strategy and helping your teams understand the 'why' behind what they build
- Track record of managing technical migrations and platform modernization: you've navigated the complexity of deprecating legacy systems while maintaining reliability and shipping new capabilities
- Strong communication skills: you can articulate technical strategy to executive stakeholders, align cross-functional partners, and create clarity in ambiguous problem spaces
- Experience in martech, adtech, or e-commerce platforms where customer data and identity resolution are core to the product
- Background working with ML teams to operationalize predictive attributes into usable, personalized products within a direct marketing platform
- Experience with experimentation frameworks and A/B testing infrastructure
- Familiarity with data privacy and compliance requirements in the context of customer identity and behavioral data