Director of Engineering - Quality & Reliability

Canoe Intelligence•New York, NY

1d•$200,000 - $230,000•Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking an experienced engineering leader to build and lead our Quality and Reliability organization. AI-native development practices have significantly increased our engineering velocity, and this role owns the other half of that equation: ensuring the software we ship is reliable, performant, and trustworthy as we scale. The ideal candidate will have built a reliability or quality engineering practice from the ground up and will bring deep quality expertise to an established QA team. This role is an exciting opportunity to stand up a new Site Reliability Engineering function, take formal ownership of incident management across the company, and lead a talented quality organization.

Requirements

Minimum of 10 years of software engineering experience, including 4 years leading quality, reliability, or platform engineering teams.
Experience building an SRE, reliability, or quality engineering practice from scratch, rather than inheriting a mature one.
Experience formally owning incident management for a company or major platform, from incident response through high-quality retrospectives and follow-through.
Deep quality engineering background, including ownership of quality strategy and experience leading distributed or offshore QA teams.
Demonstrated expertise applying LLMs and agentic tools such as Claude Code to real engineering workflows, with a concrete point of view on how AI reshapes testing and verification.
Fluency with quality and reliability metrics such as escape rate, flake rate, MTTD/MTTR, and SLO attainment, including experience reporting them at the executive level.
Excellent leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills with geographically distributed teams across multiple time zones.
Ability to work effectively with ambiguous or missing information and adapt quickly in a startup-like environment.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with our core technologies or similar stacks: Python, TypeScript, PHP/Laravel, Kafka, AWS, Terraform, PostgreSQL, Redis, ElasticSearch, Datadog.
Fintech or other environments where data integrity and client trust are the product.

Responsibilities

Build Canoe's Site Reliability Engineering practice from the ground up, including SLOs and error budgets on critical services, observability and alerting standards, production readiness reviews, and on-call design.
Own incident management across Canoe end to end, including process, tooling, escalation paths, retrospective quality, and follow-through on corrective actions.
Lead our Quality Engineering organization and build lasting in-house quality leadership and expertise.
Define a risk-based quality strategy, including quality gates in our CI/CD pipelines, and continue our shift from manual verification toward automation-first, AI-assisted testing and specification-driven development.
Define and report executive-level KPIs for quality and reliability, such as escape rates, incident trends, and error-budget consumption, and use them to inform engineering priorities across teams.
Serve as Technical Governance Owner for our testing and incident management topics, bringing a reliability, testability, and operability perspective to technical decisions in partnership with our architects.