Director of Engineering, Core Experience

Job description

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, which manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Director of Engineering, Core Experience based in the United States.** We are seeking an accomplished engineering leader to shape the shared product experiences and platform capabilities that connect multiple consumer-facing product areas. In this strategic role, you will lead engineering managers and senior technical talent, driving architecture, execution, and organizational excellence across a growing engineering organization. You will oversee critical systems spanning membership management, payments, rewards, credits, discovery, and personalized engagement. Working closely with Product, Design, Data, Growth, and Operations, you will help create seamless experiences that deliver meaningful value to members. You will also champion AI-enabled software development practices to improve engineering productivity while maintaining reliability and technical quality. This is an opportunity to influence product strategy, develop high-performing teams, and build scalable systems in a fast-moving, remote-first technology environment. ### Accountabilities - Own the technical strategy, roadmap, and delivery of the Core Experience engineering organization, ensuring members can discover, access, and benefit from shared platform capabilities. - Lead, mentor, and develop Engineering Managers and their teams, establishing clear priorities, removing organizational and technical blockers, and driving strong execution. - Oversee the systems that power membership benefits, rewards, credits, and other mechanisms that deliver value across multiple product areas. - Guide the development of homepage, discovery, and engagement experiences that help members explore products and find relevant offerings. - Build and scale membership management capabilities, enabling members to manage their subscriptions, benefits, and value across the platform. - Develop shared platform services that improve consistency across product teams, reduce duplicated effort, and accelerate delivery. - Support customer operations and service workflows that enable internal teams to provide an effective and seamless member experience. - Partner with Product, Design, Growth, Data, Operations, and Finance to deliver personalized discovery, cross-selling, and engagement initiatives. - Drive the adoption of AI-enabled engineering practices across design, implementation, testing, and development workflows, identifying opportunities to improve productivity and unlock new product capabilities. - Guide architectural decisions and system design, ensuring services remain scalable, secure, observable, reliable, and maintainable as the business grows. - Shape organizational design, hiring plans, talent development, and team structures to support the evolving needs of the engineering organization. - Continuously improve the software development lifecycle, balancing delivery speed and experimentation with technical quality and long-term sustainability. - Contribute to cross-organizational engineering initiatives, including architecture standards, technical guilds, and engineering best practices. - Engage directly in technical discussions or code when hands-on involvement is the most effective way to resolve challenges or drive progress. ### Requirements - At least five years of engineering people leadership experience, including managing managers and senior individual contributors, with at least two years at Director level or equivalent. - Demonstrated success leading multi-team engineering organizations responsible for consumer-facing products, shared platforms, or both. - At least three years of prior experience as a Senior Software Engineer or Technical Lead, with strong architectural judgment and the ability to guide senior engineers through complex technical decisions. - Experience building or scaling membership platforms, rewards programs, credit systems, loyalty mechanisms, or other shared capabilities used across multiple product teams. - Experience owning or contributing to platform infrastructure and services that support multiple product areas or business units. - A strong track record of delivering significant product and platform initiatives while balancing speed, reliability, scalability, and long-term maintainability. - Strong understanding of modern web architectures, distributed systems, and microservices, with deep expertise in either backend or frontend system design and working knowledge across the full stack. - Comfort reviewing and guiding implementations within JavaScript and Python ecosystems, with familiarity with technologies such as React, Node.js, and Python. - Experience designing, scaling, and operating production services, including performance optimization, reliability engineering, monitoring, and observability. - Proven ability to drive strategic engineering initiatives, including organizational design, OKR planning, cross-team alignment, and execution in fast-moving environments. - Experience partnering effectively with Product, Design, Growth, Data, Operations, and Finance teams to deliver customer-focused outcomes. - Strong interest in AI-assisted software development and the ability to help teams adopt AI tools and workflows thoughtfully, effectively, and responsibly. - Experience working in a startup or scale-up environment where ambiguity, rapid iteration, and evolving priorities are part of everyday work. - Excellent communication, collaboration, and leadership skills, with the ability to align stakeholders, develop talent, and translate business objectives into clear engineering strategies. Additional experience that would be an advantage: - Building membership, loyalty, rewards, subscription, or credit-based systems. - Developing personalization, recommendation engines, or AI-driven product experiences that improve discovery, cross-selling, and engagement. - Creating consumer-facing homepages, discovery interfaces, or engagement features. - Building shared platforms that serve multiple product teams or business areas. - Developing systems that support customer service and operational workflows. - Integrating payment providers such as Braintree, Adyen, or similar platforms, particularly for subscriptions, memberships, and checkout experiences. - Working on consumer platforms with multiple product verticals connected through common experiences. - Familiarity with Python, Node.js, React, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, AWS, Kubernetes, RDS, GitLab, Datadog, Amplitude, Snowflake, Material UI, and related technologies. ### Benefits - Competitive compensation: For US-based candidates, the advertised annual salary range is $215,000–$316,000, depending on experience, level, and location. - Equity opportunities: Access to equity options as part of the overall compensation package. - Comprehensive benefits: Health and other employee benefits available from the first day of employment, subject to the applicable plan terms. - Remote-first flexibility: Work remotely with flexibility to organize your working hours around your needs and responsibilities. - Unlimited paid time off: Flexible vacation arrangements, complemented by company-wide recharge days. - Team connection: Annual team offsites to encourage collaboration, relationship-building, and shared learning. - Everyday perks: Weekly Uber Eats credits and discounts on travel-related products. - Family support: Generous parental leave and a flexible return-to-work plan for growing families. - Wellness and development: Access to wellness budgets, personal development funds, and team-level learning resources. - Career growth: Opportunities to develop leadership capabilities, influence engineering strategy, and drive meaningful technical and organizational improvements.