Director of Engineering, Product & AI

Savvy Wealth • New York, NY

2d • $290,000 - $325,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Savvy Wealth is a rapidly growing Series B company in the wealth management industry, aiming to modernize the financial advisor experience with an AI-native platform. They partner with independent financial advisors, providing them with a comprehensive business solution including proprietary technology, client portal, marketing support, investment management, and client services. Savvy emphasizes the integration of AI across its operations, with a product called Savvy Intelligence and internal use of tools like Claude, supported by an AI enablement team. The company is experiencing significant growth (over 500% YoY) and is backed by substantial funding. They are recognized as a Certified Great Place to Work and have received accolades for their culture and growth.

Requirements

• Experience managing multiple engineering teams simultaneously, with accountability for delivery, staffing, performance, and growth.
• Experience making prioritization and resource decisions across teams, not just coordinating projects involving several teams.
• A track record of delivering complex customer-facing products with measurable business results.
• Ability to explain tradeoffs made, how setbacks were handled, and what changed due to leadership.
• Strong engineering depth and current system-design judgment, including reasoning through data models, service boundaries, integrations, and failure modes.
• Ability to provide useful feedback on implementation details.
• Technical fluency with applied AI, including evaluating LLM-based approaches, asking substantive questions about quality and failure modes, and guiding decisions on AI integration in products.
• Regular, hands-on use of AI development tools in personal work, with experience helping engineers use them effectively while maintaining code quality and technical understanding.
• Experience managing in-person and distributed engineers.
• Experience collaborating closely with Product and Design.
• Ability to communicate decisions clearly, surface disagreements early, and give direct, useful feedback.
• Based in or willing to relocate to NYC and work in person at the HQ.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building AI-powered features customers rely on in production (LLM integrations, agentic workflows, intelligent automations, etc.) and understanding tradeoffs around reliability, latency, cost, and failure modes.
• Fintech domain knowledge (financial services, wealth management, regulatory compliance, or financial data integrations).
• Experience leading in an early-stage, high-ambiguity startup environment.

Responsibilities

• Own engineering execution across product lines, partnering with Product and Design to translate business priorities into achievable plans, setting clear commitments, resolving cross-team dependencies, and intervening when scope, staffing, or technical decisions put delivery at risk.
• Navigate the evolving landscape of engineering leadership and teams as AI transforms the industry, driving this change across their teams.
• Shape the product engineering organization by determining team structure, ownership boundaries, and staffing needs, making deliberate tradeoffs between investing in established products, launching new capabilities, and addressing technical debt.
• Set technical direction across teams by working with tech leads to guide architecture, decide on shared capabilities, and ensure individual product decisions align with the broader system's needs.
• Demonstrate best practices through involvement in design and code reviews, using prototypes, debugging, and direct technical guidance to resolve uncertainty, showcase better approaches, and assist teams in execution.
• Connect engineering decisions to customer and business outcomes by understanding advisor product usage, challenging work that doesn't solve underlying problems, and helping teams assess the value delivered by shipped capabilities.
• Hold teams accountable for production quality by setting expectations for testing, security, observability, and reliability, ensuring teams own their shipped products and address recurring issues.
• Build out teams by driving for the best talent and skills, managing the engineering hiring pipeline, and seeking novel ways to develop talent and foster urgent, sharp decision-making in hiring.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity package
• Unlimited PTO + paid company holidays
• Access to holistic medical, dental, and vision plans
• Company 401(k), Commuter, and HSA/FSA plans
• NYC office in the heart of Manhattan
• Lunch and snacks provided in the office
• Access to virtual mental health care (Spring Health) and health concierge (Rightway)
• Access to counseling for stress management, dependent care, nutrition, fitness, legal, and financial issues (Guardian WorkLifeMatters EAP)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed