Location: 1 Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA 02139 (In-person)
Compensation: $250,000 - $330,000 (base + equity, commensurate with experience and demonstrated leadership impact)
The RoleWe are hiring a Director of Engineering to lead and scale the engineering teams responsible for Blitzy's most critical production systems. Reporting directly to the CTO, you will own engineering execution across our backend platform, infrastructure, and AI product surface - directly managing and developing a team of Principal and Senior Engineers.
This is a hands-on leadership role. You will be expected to stay close to the code, make credible technical decisions, and hold the bar on delivery quality. We are looking for a leader who knows how to get great engineers to do their best work, remove what gets in their way, and drive outcomes that matter to customers.
What Success Looks Like- Engineering teams under your leadership ship reliably, predictably, and at high quality - without constant re-prioritization or rework
- You reduce delivery friction through clear ownership, smart process, and tight feedback loops
- Principal and Senior Engineers are unblocked, growing, and doing the best work of their careers
- You maintain a close enough pulse on the technical work to identify risk early and course-correct before it compounds
- You translate product and business priorities into clear engineering roadmaps with realistic commitments
- Incident response is coordinated, post-mortems lead to real change, and reliability improves over time
- You are a trusted partner to the CTO, Leadership team, and Customer Success - communicating clearly and proactively
- You build a team culture of accountability, craftsmanship, and speed without sacrificing durability
Areas of Ownership- Engineering execution across backend platform, infrastructure, and AI-powered systems
- Direct management of Principal Engineers and Senior Engineers across platform teams
- Engineering roadmap planning, sprint execution, and delivery forecasting in close partnership with Leadership
- Hiring, onboarding, and leveling decisions for the engineering organization
- Engineering culture: code review standards, incident response, technical documentation, and team rituals
- Cross-functional communication: translating engineering status, risk, and tradeoffs for non-technical stakeholders
- Operational reliability: uptime, SLA adherence, and production incident coordination across teams
Required Experience- 5+ years of engineering management experience, including direct management of senior or principal-level engineers
- Prior experience as a hands-on engineer with deep backend expertise - you can read and reason about production code
- Demonstrated track record of shipping complex software products on time and at scale
- Experience leading engineering teams building and operating cloud-native, distributed systems in production
- Strong technical fluency across most of the following:
- Backend: Python (primary), microservices, REST and gRPC APIs
- Cloud & Infrastructure: GCP,, AWS or Azure; Kubernetes; Terraform
- Databases: PostgreSQL, NoSQL systems; vector and graph databases a plus
- AI/LLM Systems: familiarity with LLM-powered product development and evaluation pipelines
- Experience hiring, leveling, and developing engineers in a fast-moving startup or high-growth company
- Ability to engage credibly in technical design discussions and challenge decisions constructively
What Makes You Stand Out- You've led delivery of a platform or infrastructure modernization initiative that measurably improved reliability or velocity
- You have direct experience leading engineering in an AI-native or LLM-powered product company
- You've built and scaled engineering teams from early stage through enterprise-grade production environments
- You use data and instrumentation to diagnose delivery problems - not instinct alone
- You've successfully navigated the tension between product speed and technical sustainability, and have a clear point of view on how to do it
What Makes This Role Different- You will manage some of the most technically capable engineers in the market - your credibility must be earned, not assumed
- You are working at the frontier of AI-powered enterprise software development, with a platform that has over 27 patents and counting
- Your teams build and improve Blitzy using Blitzy itself - holding the platform to the highest real-world production standards
- This is a small, senior organization - your decisions have direct company-wide impact and are felt immediately
- You operate with a high degree of autonomy and executive trust in a fast-moving, low-ego, high-output environment
