Director of Engineering

Nectar Social • Palo Alto, CA

3d • $250,000 - $325,000

About The Position

We are looking for a Director of Engineering who operates with the mindset of a product executive to lead, align, and scale our core engineering organization. Our team includes multiple core engineering groups focused on customer-facing product development, as well as a Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) function that moves fast across the full stack on high-priority enterprise initiatives. Under your leadership, these teams will build and scale high-throughput systems that ingest large volumes of social data, run real-time AI agents, and deliver insights through analytics and automation.

This is an executive-level leadership role that bridges technical vision, organizational scale, and business strategy. At the same time, you will build and empower high-performing engineering teams, manage engineering managers and leads, establish systemic technical quality, and guide our engineering organization as we scale from ~50 people into our next phase of growth.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3+ years in a senior leadership role (Director, Head of Engineering) managing managers and leading multi-team organizations.
• Proven experience growing engineering teams and organizational structures through key growth phases (e.g., scaling orgs from 30 to 100+ engineers).
• Strong business and product instincts with a track record of translating complex product objectives into achievable engineering roadmaps and resource plans.
• Deep foundational technical background with the ability to hold engineering teams accountable, evaluate high-level architectural trade-offs, and participate in complex technical discussions.
• History of working seamlessly alongside Product, Design, Sales, and Customer Success executives in fast-paced startup environments.
• Demonstrated ability to implement light-footprint, high-impact processes that maintain speed and quality without introducing unnecessary bureaucracy.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with experience presenting technical strategy to executive leadership, boards, and customers.

Nice To Haves

• Experience leading engineering teams in B2B SaaS, social data platforms, developer tools, or marketing technology.
• Experience overseeing teams building, deploying, or operating AI-powered systems, real-time analytics platforms, or agentic frameworks.
• Strategic familiarity with modern cloud and data stacks such as AWS, TypeScript/React, Postgres, ClickHouse, and modern infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Pulumi).
• Executive oversight of teams delivering both web and native mobile application ecosystems.

Responsibilities

• Lead, manage, and mentor a high-performing engineering organization, including Engineering Managers and Tech Leads. Build scalable org structures, career ladders, and succession plans to retain top talent.
• Partner directly with the CEO and executive peers to define long-term roadmaps, align engineering capacity with business priorities, and turn product vision into predictable technical execution.
• Set the high-level technical strategy, architecture principles, and infrastructure roadmap. Ensure scalable system architecture across teams handling high-volume real-time data and AI agentic workflows.
• Drive operational rigor across all engineering teams. Establish clear metrics for delivery velocity, system reliability, code quality, and operational health.
• Engage directly with key enterprise customers and prospects to understand user pain points, build deep business intuition, and ensure technical investments map directly to business value.
• Shape engineering culture as the company scales. Refine organizational processes around architecture reviews, incident response, resource allocation, and continuous improvement.
• Partner with Talent Acquisition to scale the engineering department, driving talent acquisition strategies, executive hiring, and interviewing standards for top-tier technical talent.

What This Job Offers

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