Technical Director

Job description

About the Role: When you're building for hundreds of millions of users across a portfolio this broad, the hardest problems rarely stay inside a single team or system. We're looking for a Technical Director to take on those problems across the organization, on our newest, most cross-functional, and most technically demanding efforts. This is a senior individual-contributor role where influence comes from engineering judgment rather than headcount. You'll step into ambiguous, high-stakes initiatives like greenfield platforms, cross-domain architecture, and problems no single team owns yet, set the technical direction, and see them through to durable outcomes. You'll stay hands-on throughout, raise the engineering bar across the teams you work with, and serve as a technical authority that both engineering and the business can rely on. In this role, you will: • Lead the design, planning, and implementation of end-to-end solutions for complex systems that span the organization, from architecture through operations and observability. • Spot gaps and opportunities across domains and take the initiative to address them, including work that doesn't yet have a clear owner. • Set and enforce engineering standards across multiple teams so we stay consistent in how we design, build, and operate. • Weigh functionality against cost, scalability, and long-term sustainability, and make those tradeoffs clear to stakeholders. • Partner with product management and business stakeholders to shape roadmaps and keep technical direction aligned with business goals. • Define and drive the KPIs that matter for the systems you own, such as error rates, uptime, latency, and resilience, and hold delivery to them. • Prototype and evaluate unfamiliar technologies quickly, then coach teams to adopt them well. • Mentor engineers, raise the bar in design and code reviews, and act as a bar raiser in hiring. • Keep leadership's mental model current by surfacing risks early, communicating clearly across functions, and owning outcomes in fast-moving, ambiguous spaces. About You: • 12+ years building and operating production software at scale, including a track record of owning architecture for a complex product or domain and influencing decisions across teams you don't manage. • Strong systems thinking. You've taken hard, ambiguous, cross-cutting problems and turned them into coherent, maintainable systems. • A solid hands-on technical foundation across programming languages, data technologies, and platform and infrastructure, with the range to lead in an unfamiliar environment rather than only where you know the stack. • Fluency in API and data-contract design, and the discipline to enforce the contracts that hold multiple systems together. • Sound engineering economics. You weigh performance, cost, scalability, and operability, and you can defend your tradeoffs to senior stakeholders. • High ownership and real comfort with ambiguity. You drive the work rather than wait for a ticket. • Excellent communication. You can articulate both technical direction and business impact to engineers and executives alike. • Bachelor's degree in Engineering or a related field. Master's or Ph.D. preferred. • Experience in a multi-cloud environment. Hands-on AWS depth is a strong plus. • Experience with event-driven architectures, streaming and messaging, and telemetry pipelines at scale. • A background working under security, privacy, or regulatory constraints such as PII, identity, or financial and credit data. • Familiarity with observability tooling and defining SLOs and alerting. • Experience leading through AI-assisted development, with a clear sense of where it speeds you up and where human judgment still has to win. What's Next: The interview process is designed for a senior technical hire and blends technical depth with cross-functional collaboration: • A system-design and architecture discussion focused on how you approach complex, ambiguous problems. • A code-review or technical-judgment exercise in place of a timed coding test, centered on engineering quality and decision-making. • An interview with the Hiring Manager. • A cross-functional discussion with product and stakeholder partners. • A final conversation with leadership.