Director, Software Engineering

AppFolio is a technology leader powering the future of the real estate industry, seeking a Director of Software Engineering to manage and grow its platform engineering organization. The role involves driving the delivery of internal developer platforms and tools, overseeing engineering strategies, and leading a team focused on enhancing developer experience.

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. and a potential future backend development team
• 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
• Experience with GetDX, JellyFish, or other developer metrics used to continuously improve the developer experience and productivity

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