Director of Engineering

Nectar Social

$175K — $210K *
Enterprise Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years in senior leadership roles
  • Proven track record of scaling engineering teams through significant growth phases
  • Ability to translate complex product objectives into achievable engineering roadmaps
  • Deep technical background for effective accountability and architectural evaluation
  • Experience collaborating with cross-functional executives in startup settings
  • Expertise in implementing efficient and high-impact operational processes
  • Exceptional communication skills with a history of engaging with executive leadership and clients

Responsibilities

  • Lead and mentor a high-performing engineering organization
  • Align engineering capacity with strategic business priorities
  • Set the high-level technical strategy and architecture principles
  • Drive operational rigor and establish metrics for delivery success
  • Engage with enterprise customers to understand user pain points
  • Shape and refine engineering culture and processes as the team scales
  • Partner with Talent Acquisition to drive engineering talent acquisition strategies

Benefits

  • Collaborative and innovative work environment
  • Opportunity to lead engineering teams through critical growth phases
  • Direct engagement with senior executives and enterprise clients
  • Impactful role in shaping product and technical strategies
  • Support for talent development and career progression
  • Flexible work arrangements to support work-life balance
Full Job Description
The Role

We are looking for a Director of Engineering who operates with the mindset of a product executive to lead, align, and scale our core engineering organization. Our team includes multiple core engineering groups focused on customer-facing product development, as well as a Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) function that moves fast across the full stack on high-priority enterprise initiatives. Under your leadership, these teams will build and scale high-throughput systems that ingest large volumes of social data, run real-time AI agents, and deliver insights through analytics and automation.

This is an executive-level leadership role that bridges technical vision, organizational scale, and business strategy. At the same time, you will build and empower high-performing engineering teams, manage engineering managers and leads, establish systemic technical quality, and guide our engineering organization as we scale from ~50 people into our next phase of growth.

What You'll Be Doing
  • Organizational Leadership & Team Scaling: Lead, manage, and mentor a high-performing engineering organization, including Engineering Managers and Tech Leads. Build scalable org structures, career ladders, and succession plans to retain top talent.
  • Product & Strategic Alignment: Partner directly with the CEO and executive peers to define long-term roadmaps, align engineering capacity with business priorities, and turn product vision into predictable technical execution.
  • Technical Vision & System Governance: Set the high-level technical strategy, architecture principles, and infrastructure roadmap. Ensure scalable system architecture across teams handling high-volume real-time data and AI agentic workflows.
  • Execution & Delivery Excellence: Drive operational rigor across all engineering teams. Establish clear metrics for delivery velocity, system reliability, code quality, and operational health.
  • Customer & Market Empathy: Engage directly with key enterprise customers and prospects to understand user pain points, build deep business intuition, and ensure technical investments map directly to business value.
  • Engineering Culture & Processes: Shape engineering culture as the company scales. Refine organizational processes around architecture reviews, incident response, resource allocation, and continuous improvement.
  • Hiring & Employer Brand: Partner with Talent Acquisition to scale the engineering department, driving talent acquisition strategies, executive hiring, and interviewing standards for top-tier technical talent.
What We're Looking For
  • Experience Level: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3+ years in a senior leadership role (Director, Head of Engineering) managing managers and leading multi-team organizations.
  • Track Record of Scaling: Proven experience growing engineering teams and organizational structures through key growth phases (e.g., scaling orgs from 30 to 100+ engineers).
  • Strategic Product Acumen: Strong business and product instincts with a track record of translating complex product objectives into achievable engineering roadmaps and resource plans.
  • Technical Depth: Deep foundational technical background with the ability to hold engineering teams accountable, evaluate high-level architectural trade-offs, and participate in complex technical discussions.
  • Executive Cross-Functional Collaboration: History of working seamlessly alongside Product, Design, Sales, and Customer Success executives in fast-paced startup environments.
  • Operational Mastery: Demonstrated ability to implement light-footprint, high-impact processes that maintain speed and quality without introducing unnecessary bureaucracy.
  • Communication & Executive Presence: Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with experience presenting technical strategy to executive leadership, boards, and customers.
Bonus Points
  • Domain Expertise: Experience leading engineering teams in B2B SaaS, social data platforms, developer tools, or marketing technology.
  • AI & Data Infrastructure at Scale: Experience overseeing teams building, deploying, or operating AI-powered systems, real-time analytics platforms, or agentic frameworks.
  • Tech Stack Alignment: Strategic familiarity with modern cloud and data stacks such as AWS, TypeScript/React, Postgres, ClickHouse, and modern infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Pulumi).
  • Cross-Platform Leadership: Executive oversight of teams delivering both web and native mobile application ecosystems.

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