Senior Director, Product Engineering

Responsibilities

Lead and Scale the Applications Organization

• Lead an approximately 40-person engineering organization across the US and India, including engineering managers and senior technical leaders.
• Build a scalable leadership structure with clear ownership, accountability, and fast decision-making across regions.
• Coach and develop engineering managers into strong leaders of people, technology, and execution.
• Recruit, retain, and develop exceptional talent, with particular focus on growing the team and leadership bench in India.
• Foster ownership, technical excellence, accountability, continuous improvement, context, and autonomy.

Own Product Engineering and Delivery

• Own application development end to end, from requirements and architecture through implementation, testing, release, and ongoing improvement.
• Partner with Product Management and UX on product direction, scope, priorities, and delivery plans.
• Establish realistic plans and estimates, identify dependencies and risks, and drive predictable execution across concurrent initiatives.
• Communicate progress, tradeoffs, risks, and changes to engineering and company leadership.

Drive Technical Excellence and Quality

• Provide technical leadership across Java backend services and Svelte-based frontend applications by reviewing designs, evaluating tradeoffs, and guiding scalable, maintainable solutions.
• Partner with Distinguished Engineers and senior technical leaders on architecture and engineering standards.
• Maintain high standards for performance, scalability, security, maintainability, and user experience.
• Own release readiness and product quality, including feature validation, automated testing, regression coverage, performance, security, and production readiness.
• Partner with QA on test strategy, plans, and automation.
• Improve design reviews, code reviews, development workflows, and release processes using defects, production issues, and customer feedback to drive systemic improvements.

Build an AI-Native Engineering Organization

• Evolve the use of AI across coding, testing, debugging, code review, and design.
• Encourage AI-assisted development experimentation while establishing practices that measurably improve engineering outcomes.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading engineering teams and managers.
• Experience leading a sizable, multi-team engineering organization and scaling its leadership structure through managers and senior individual contributors.
• Strong technical background building sophisticated enterprise software, with the ability to evaluate architecture and design across backend and frontend systems.
• Track record delivering complex software products with accountability for schedule, quality, and technical outcomes.
• Experience balancing roadmap delivery with architecture, technical debt, and long-term engineering investment.
• Experience partnering with Product Management and UX/Design to influence requirements, priorities, scope, and strategy.
• Strong organizational and planning skills across initiatives, dependencies, resources, and risks.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including communicating technical decisions, tradeoffs, risks, and organizational issues to senior leadership.
• Leadership style centered on ownership, high standards, transparency, and developing strong leaders.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience building on-premises or self-hosted enterprise software.
• Experience leading engineering organizations distributed across the US and India.
• Experience building applications with Java and modern frontend frameworks.
• Experience with networking concepts, including Layer 2/3 protocols, network infrastructure, network security, or network visibility and management products.
• Experience applying AI tools across the software development lifecycle and driving adoption across engineering teams.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary: $270,000–$350,000 per year.
• Annualized bonus in addition to base salary.
• Regular, full-time position.
• Santa Clara-based employees work from the office two days per week; remote candidates in the United States are also considered.
• Occasional travel, including approximately 1–2 trips to India per year.