Director of Engineering

Pawlicy Advisor

8d•$215,000 - $240,000•Remote

About The Position

Pawlicy Advisor is a venture-backed startup focused on eliminating the problem of pet parents being unable to afford necessary veterinary care. They operate the most trusted pet insurance marketplace in the US, distributed through veterinary practices. Having achieved product-market fit and raised significant funding, Pawlicy Advisor is scaling and hiring a Director of Engineering. This role is responsible for leading the engineering organization, including technical strategy, architecture, quality, security, delivery, and team growth. It is a hands-on position where the Director will set standards for how the team builds, including the use of AI tools. The role reports to the Chief Product Officer and manages a team of engineers working with a senior product manager, senior product designer, and data analyst.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience.
5+ years managing engineers.
2+ years in a senior engineering leadership role (Director, or senior-most technical leader), ideally at an early stage startup or fast-moving environment.
Experience with the following stack: TypeScript, Next.js, Node, GraphQL, Postgres, AWS.
Proven technical ownership and leadership: owned the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for a production consumer product, and built or scaled the team that delivered it.
Still hands-on: comfortable reviewing PRs, reading code deeply, and jumping into an incident.
Experience with application security and third-party compliance: security reviews, vendor questionnaires, and audits.
Track record of excellent cross-department communication and relationships leading to business success.
Practical enthusiasm for AI-assisted development.
Legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship.

Nice To Haves

Experience in insurance or fintech.
Experience with partner API integrations.
Love animals and believe pet healthcare is a serious, underserved problem.

Responsibilities

Make key architectural decisions, including major tech choices, build vs buy decisions, site scalability, and carrier integrations.
Conduct security reviews of product and infrastructure changes, and manage carrier and vendor security questionnaires and audits.
Serve as the technical point of contact and leader with key partners.
Manage release management and deployment, including CI/CD, release cadence, rollbacks, and production stability.
Prioritize technical debt and refactoring in balance with feature velocity.
Oversee QA and testing processes, including automated coverage, manual QA, and quality standards before release.
Manage on-call rotations, escalation paths, incident response, and postmortems.
Oversee the career development of engineers through 1:1s, performance feedback, and unblocking the team.
Build the engineering team by hiring and onboarding new engineers.
Approve new internal software based on cost, security, and fit, including managing renewals and replacements.
Manage engineering tooling and infrastructure spend, including cloud costs, licenses, and consolidation opportunities.
Own and evolve Pawlicy's AI policy and best practices, leading the company's rollout and expansion of AI usage while optimizing cost.
Partner on OKR creation and ownership of key business goals and objectives.
Collaborate with Product on sprint priorities, tech debt vs feature velocity tradeoffs, and delivery timelines.
Partner with Design on front-end quality and design QA.
Collaborate with Partnerships and Legal on carrier and vendor security questionnaires, audits, and integration requirements.
Work with Data and Analytics on tooling and reliable data flow across product systems.