Director of Engineering

Kiddom•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Kiddom is a groundbreaking educational platform that promotes student equity and growth by uniting high-quality instructional materials with dynamic digital learning. Through unparalleled curriculum management functionality, Kiddom empowers schools and districts to take ownership of their curriculum – resulting in learning experiences tailored to meet the unique needs and goals of local communities. Kiddom’s high-quality curriculum is layered with robust teacher and leader data insights to drive the continuous improvement of instructional decisions, school/district programming, and professional learning. Kiddom is seeking a hands-on Director of Engineering to lead key parts of our engineering organization and help bring our AI-first product vision to life. Reporting to the VP Engineering, this leader will be responsible for managing multiple engineering teams, driving delivery excellence, and evolving our platform to support district-scale impact. You will translate the company’s technical strategy into execution: building high-performing teams, maturing our architecture and infrastructure, and partnering closely with Product, Data, AI and Curriculum to ship AI-powered features that teachers and students love.

Requirements

10+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years leading and scaling teams in a SaaS environment
Has managed multiple teams working on a range of products
Strong background in building and operating distributed systems and cloud-native platforms
Experience delivering products that leverage AI/ML (for example, recommendations, automation, analytics) or working closely with data science/ML teams
Familiarity with modern data pipelines, security best practices, and observability
Comfortable diving into technical discussions and guiding teams on trade-offs, even if you are not writing code daily
Be able to be ‘in the weeds’ with the engineers driving technical decisions

Responsibilities

Own delivery for a portfolio of product and platform areas, ensuring your teams ship high-quality software on time
Help define and drive adoption of engineering best practices
Contribute to technical decision-making on architecture, frameworks, and key platform investments
Lead, coach, and grow engineering managers and senior engineers across backend, frontend, DevOps, data, and AI-adjacent teams
Implement and refine processes for planning, estimation, documentation, and cross-team collaboration
Partner with the engineering leadership on career ladders, performance management, and succession planning within engineering
Work with Product, Data, and Curriculum teams to deliver AI-powered features that improve personalization, grading, insights, and curriculum recommendations
Help teams integrate AI capabilities into existing workflows in ways that are intuitive, reliable, and impactful for educators and students
Partner with platform and SRE teams to improve CI/CD pipelines, observability, and cloud cost efficiency
Work with data engineering to design and maintain scalable, well-modeled data pipelines that power AI and analytics features
Support integration of real-time and batch data sources into the product in ways that are secure, privacy-preserving, and aligned with education data regulations
Partner with Product and GTM leaders to prioritize work based on customer impact, state adoption cycles, and business goals
Collaborate with Customer Success and Support to understand field feedback and translate it into backlog items and improvements
Help GTM teams with procurement processes and procedures, including privacy and security guidelines as well as RFO proposals

Benefits

Competitive salary
Meaningful equity
Health insurance benefits: medical (various PPO/HMO/HSA plans), dental, vision, disability and life insurance
One Medical membership (in participating locations)
Flexible vacation time policy (subject to internal approval). Average use 4 weeks off per year.
10 paid sick days per year (pro rated depending on start date)
Paid holidays
Paid bereavement leave
Paid family leave after birth/adoption. Minimum of 16 paid weeks for birthing parents, 10 weeks for caretaker parents. Meant to supplement benefits offered by State.
Commuter and FSA plans