Director of Engineering, Product & AI

Savvy

$175K — $210K *
Finance & Insurance
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience leading and managing multiple engineering teams
  • Proven track record of delivering complex customer-facing products with measurable business results
  • Strong engineering depth and current system-design judgment
  • Technical fluency with applied AI methodologies
  • Hands-on experience with AI development tools
  • History of effective collaboration with Product and Design teams in both in-person and distributed environments
  • Willingness to relocate to NYC for in-person work

Responsibilities

  • Own engineering execution across multiple product lines
  • Navigate the evolving landscape of AI in engineering leadership
  • Shape and structure the product engineering organization
  • Set and guide the technical direction across teams
  • Demonstrate best practices in design and code reviews
  • Connect engineering outcomes to customer and business impact
  • Hold teams accountable for production quality and reliability
  • Build and develop high-performing engineering teams

Benefits

  • Competitive salary and equity package
  • Unlimited PTO and paid company holidays
  • Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans
  • 401(k) plan along with commuter and HSA/FSA options
  • Central NYC office location
  • On-site lunch and snacks
  • Access to virtual mental health care and health concierge services
  • Counseling support for various personal challenges through EAP
Full Job Description
The role

Savvy is hiring an Engineering Director, Product & AI to lead all engineering teams building our products. You'll oversee multiple product lines, including our advisor-facing AI product, each with its own Engineering, Product, and Design team. You'll own engineering strategy, execution, and organizational development across those teams, partnering with Product and Design leaders to decide where to invest and what to build next.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You'll guide architecture, work through difficult decisions with tech leads, and show what good looks like in both the systems we build and how we deliver them. You should be comfortable reviewing a consequential change, challenging an implementation plan, or building a prototype to make an approach concrete. You'll also develop leaders who can make sound decisions and run their teams independently.

We're looking for someone who has seen this stage of growth before: sales is going well, we're launching new product offerings, new product lines, the team is growing, and the stakes are just getting higher by the day.

Based at our NYC headquarters, you'll work alongside Product, Design, and business stakeholders while leading multiple engineering teams focused on Savvy's growing product lines.

Responsibilities
  • Own engineering execution across product lines. Partner with Product and Design to turn business priorities into achievable plans. Set clear commitments, resolve cross-team dependencies, and intervene when scope, staffing, or technical decisions put delivery at risk.
  • Navigate the world of engineering leadership and teams as AI changes everything. Everyone can do so much more now, lines between roles are blurring. Drive this change across your teams.
  • Shape the product engineering organization. Determine team structure, ownership boundaries, and staffing needs. Make deliberate tradeoffs between investing in established products, launching new capabilities, and addressing technical debt.
  • Set technical direction across teams. Work with tech leads to guide architecture, decide which capabilities should be shared, and keep individual product decisions consistent with the needs of the broader system.
  • Show what good looks like. Stay involved in consequential design and code reviews. Use prototypes, debugging, and direct technical guidance to resolve uncertainty, demonstrate better approaches, and help teams execute.
  • Connect engineering decisions to customer and business outcomes. Understand how advisors use our products, challenge work that does not solve the underlying problem, and help teams assess whether shipped capabilities deliver the intended value.
  • Hold teams accountable for production quality. Set expectations for testing, security, observability, and reliability. Ensure teams own what they ship and address recurring problems rather than repeatedly working around them.
  • Build out your teams, driving for the best talent and skills. Beyond just running the engineering hiring pipeline across your teams, we look for novelty in getting great talent unstuck from their existing roles and a drive for urgency and sharp decision making in hiring.


Must have
  • Experience managing multiple engineering teams simultaneously, with accountability for delivery, staffing, performance, and growth. You have made prioritization and resource decisions across teams, not only coordinated projects involving several teams.
  • Experience managing multiple engineering teams simultaneously, with accountability for delivery, staffing, performance, and growth. You have made prioritization and resource decisions across teams, not only coordinated projects involving several teams.
  • A track record of delivering complex customer-facing products with measurable business results. You can explain the tradeoffs you made, how you handled setbacks, and what changed because of your leadership.
  • Strong engineering depth and current system-design judgment. You can reason through data models, service boundaries, integrations, and failure modes, and provide useful feedback on implementation details.You can explain the tradeoffs you made, how you handled setbacks, and what changed because of your leadership.
  • Technical fluency with applied AI. You can evaluate proposed LLM-based approaches, ask substantive questions about quality and failure modes, and guide decisions about where AI belongs in a product.
  • Regular, hands-on use of AI development tools in your own work, with experience helping engineers use them effectively while maintaining code quality and technical understanding.
  • Experience managing in-person and distributed engineers and collaborating closely with Product and Design. You communicate decisions clearly, surface disagreements early, and give direct, useful feedback.
  • Based in or willing to relocate to NYC and work in person at our HQ (Union Square!)


Nice to have
  • You've built AI-powered features customers rely on in production: LLM integrations, agentic workflows, intelligent automations, or similar, and you understand the real tradeoffs around reliability, latency, cost, and failure modes.
  • Fintech domain knowledge: financial services, wealth management, regulatory compliance, or financial data integrations.
  • Experience leading in an early-stage, high-ambiguity startup environment.
Benefits:
  • Competitive salary and equity package
  • Unlimited PTO + paid company holidays
  • Access to holistic medical, dental, and vision plans
  • Company 401(k), Commuter, and HSA/FSA plans
  • NYC office in the heart of Manhattan
  • Lunch and snacks provided in the office
  • Access to virtual mental health care (Spring Health) and health concierge (Rightway) to help you find the right care
  • Access to counseling for stress management, dependent care, nutrition, fitness, legal, and financial issues (Guardian WorkLifeMatters EAP)

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