Director, Product Engineering

What You’ll Do

• Own delivery across 3–5 product squads spanning Workforce Intelligence, Strategic Workforce Planning, Job & Skills Architecture, Organizational Design, and Synappy.
• Set the bar for engineering excellence — architecture, code quality, testing, observability, on-call practice, and developer experience — and hold the organization to it.
• Partner closely with Product Management, Design, and Data Science to convert customer problems into shippable solutions — with a strong bias for predictable, transparent delivery rhythms without sacrificing engineering judgment or quality.
• Own the architectural roadmap for our SaaS platform and Data-as-a-Service offerings, ensuring our systems can keep pace with hundreds of millions of daily data points and a rapidly expanding customer base.
• Champion modern practices — CI/CD, AI-assisted development, automated testing, SLO-driven operations, and pragmatic DevSecOps — and operationalize them across squads.
• Represent Engineering in cross-functional planning, executive reviews, and customer conversations.
• Translate technical risk and opportunity into business language for the executive team and the board.
• Partner with Security, Legal, and Trust & Governance to maintain enterprise-grade compliance posture for a customer base that includes more than 60% of the Fortune 100.

What You’ll Bring

Required

• 12+ years in software engineering, with at least 5 years leading engineering organizations of 25+ engineers, including managing managers.
• Demonstrated success scaling a B2B SaaS or data-intensive product, ideally in HR Tech, analytics, or another data-heavy domain.
• Hands-on technical depth in modern microservices architectures and cloud-native engineering on AWS — you can credibly engage in design reviews, debate trade-offs, and earn the trust of senior engineers.
• Strong background with the kinds of technologies in our stack: Java/Spring, Python, Node.js, relational databases (Postgres/MySQL/Aurora), and AWS services.
• Track record of partnering effectively with Product Management and Design in a product-led environment — not as an order-taker, but as an equal partner in discovery and outcomes.
• Experience leading distributed teams across multiple time zones, with cultural fluency for India, the UK, EU, and US.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to move comfortably between an architecture whiteboard, a sprint review, and an executive readout.

Strongly preferred

• Hands-on experience shipping production GenAI / LLM-powered features — including evaluation, prompt engineering, RAG patterns, and managing model cost, latency, and quality trade-offs.
• Experience with large-scale data ingestion, ETL/ELT, and analytics platforms (e.g., web crawling at scale, NLP pipelines, taxonomy and skills extraction).
• Prior experience in HR Tech, workforce planning, talent intelligence, or labor market analytics.
• Experience operating in a private-equity-backed growth environment with the cadence and discipline that requires.