Director of Engineering - Collaborative Web Platform

Pantheon is a company that powers over 300,000 websites globally and is seeking a visionary Director of Engineering to lead the development of a collaborative web content platform. The role involves defining the engineering strategy, leading a high-performing team, and driving the technical execution of a zero-to-one product that enhances how content teams create and manage web content.

Responsibilities:

• Define and execute the engineering strategy for the collaborative web platform, aligning technical investments with product milestones and long-term platform vision
• Build, lead, and develop a high-performing team of engineers and engineering managers, establishing a culture of ownership, technical rigor, and continuous improvement
• Partner with product and design leadership to translate vision into concrete engineering plans — breaking ambiguity into phased, deliverable roadmaps
• Collaborate with executive leadership on resourcing strategy, headcount planning, and cross-functional dependencies
• Represent engineering in go-to-market discussions, customer conversations, and partnership evaluations where technical credibility matters
• Drive architectural decisions for the platform's core systems: real-time collaboration, branch-aware content state, API and integration layers, and visual editing infrastructure
• Establish and champion engineering standards across the full stack — backend services, frontend systems, APIs, testing, observability, and deployment
• Guide build-vs-buy decisions and technology selection with a clear framework for long-term scalability and developer experience
• Maintain a strong technical point of view while remaining open to input — you will be a trusted thought partner for staff and principal engineers on the team
• Own end-to-end delivery accountability: planning, execution, quality, and iteration velocity across the team
• Manage technical debt and modernization tradeoffs in a zero-to-one context where the right call is often to move fast — and occasionally to refactor deliberately
• Establish the operational practices that will scale with the product: incident response, SLOs, deployment cadence, and on-call health
• Drive recruiting and hiring for the team, in partnership with talent acquisition, ensuring a high bar for technical and cultural fit

Requirements:

• 12+ years of engineering experience
• 5+ years in senior engineering leadership roles managing teams of engineers and engineering managers
• Proven track record of building and shipping products from early-stage through scale — ideally including at least one zero-to-one or platform-founding experience
• Strong organizational builder: you have hired, developed, and retained excellent engineers, and you know what a high-performing team culture actually feels like
• Experience leading full-stack product engineering teams, with genuine fluency in both frontend and backend concerns
• Demonstrated ability to operate in a high-ambiguity environment — setting direction and maintaining team momentum without a complete map
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field
• Deep understanding of modern web platform architecture: APIs, real-time data synchronization, cloud-native services, and component-based frontend systems
• Fluency in cloud infrastructure and deployment (GCP, AWS, or Azure), container orchestration, and CI/CD pipelines
• Enough frontend architecture depth to credibly engage with engineers building visual editing experiences, component systems, and browser-side state management
• Experience with distributed systems design — especially in contexts involving collaborative state, branching models, or event-driven data flows
• Executive-level communication: you can make the technical accessible to non-technical stakeholders, and the strategic accessible to engineers
• Strong written communicator — you write clear design docs, decision memos, and team updates without requiring editing
• Effective cross-functional partner who builds trust and alignment with product, design, sales, and customer success peers
• Master's degree in Computer Science or related field
• Familiarity with CMS, developer tooling, or web publishing platforms