Director of Engineering

Responsibilities

• Lead as an AI-first effort: orchestrate AI agents to create specs, generate code and tests, verify results, and run reviews while ensuring humans own and validate every line that ships.
• Stay hands-on in the codebase: set architecture patterns, write and review critical code, prototype, and unblock hard technical problems.
• Own end-to-end delivery of the product roadmap: turn “what to ship” into “how to build,” owning execution sequencing, technical risk, quality, security, and release across air-gapped, cross-domain, internet-connected, and native-cloud deployments.
• Set technical direction: drive architecture and technology choices for high-assurance environments at scale.
• Build and lead a high-performance distributed team across Romania, Vietnam, and Hungary: recruit, develop, retain engineers and leads, create career paths, and foster a strong engineering culture.
• Drive performance-based management: set measurable expectations, promote top performers, continuously raise the bar, coach or exit underperformers.
• Hold a security-first quality bar: champion code review (human and AI-generated) with focus on injection risks, insecure defaults, validation, and privilege-escalation in file-handling and authentication.
• Raise engineering velocity: improve CI/CD, AI-assisted workflows, incident response, and operational maturity.
• Codify AI-native practices: establish playbooks, AI context files, coding harnesses, test frameworks, and review norms for adoption by other product teams.
• Partner cross-functionally with VP Products, Product Management, Design, and security leaders to commit to scope, timelines, and manage trade-offs.

Requirements

• Full agentic development experience: personally run a full agentic, AI-powered SDLC end-to-end in B2B and high-security enterprise environments with strict compliance, data sensitivity, and assurance requirements. Must show real work (PRs, commits, shipped products, or portfolio) where agentic workflows drove delivery.
• Launched a product via full AI-powered SDLC: experience taking a product from spec to release using AI-assisted lifecycle (spec generation, code/test generation, automated verification, AI-assisted review, CI/CD).
• 8+ years software engineering experience and 3+ years leading engineering teams (including managing managers/leads) through complex product delivery at scale.
• Proven performance-based leadership: track record building high-performing teams via rigorous performance management, timely talent decisions, promoting excellence, and addressing low performance.
• Deep technical excellence: strong command of design patterns, SOLID principles, modern architecture; able to evaluate AI-assisted code with same rigor as human code.
• Scalable systems experience: building scalable, distributed solutions including relational/document databases, cloud-native services, and modern CI/CD.
• Quality and test discipline: high bar for tested, maintainable code; use AI to accelerate test scaffolding while validating real coverage.
• Distributed-team leadership: ability to lead and align engineers across countries and time zones, building trust and clarity.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with secure managed file transfer, threat prevention (multiscanning, Deep CDR, DLP), or high-assurance/air-gapped/cross-domain systems.
• Background in cybersecurity products serving governments, critical infrastructure, utilities, financial institutions, or defense contractors.