Director of Product Engineering

Nomad Labs • Denver, CO

1d • Onsite

About The Position

Nomad is building the financial and property management infrastructure for the largest, least-served class of entrepreneurs in America: small landlords. We already have: A strong, highly autonomous team of engineers A product customers rely on and value Real traction and meaningful revenue This role exists to add leverage to a system that’s already working - helping us move faster, make better decisions, and scale intelligently. The shape of the role This is a coach role managing engineers but at the seam of engineering and product. You’re here to: Understand what’s working Improve how we decide what to build, and how we build Help a strong team operate high levels of clarity, speed, and impact. Note this role is leading Engineering (with a focus on product Engineering) but is not leading Product.

Requirements

• Have been a strong engineer and moved into leadership, and maybe even product.
• Have led high-performing engineering teams at a startup or growth-stage company.
• Are product-minded and think in terms of business outcomes.
• Bringing rigor and shape to product ideas before they reach engineering, instead of letting them arrive as creative starting points engineers must reshape mid-build.
• Know how to balance autonomy with alignment.
• You are low ego and collaborative.
• You are trusted by engineers and trust them in return.
• You can engage technically without needing to control every decision.
• You care about developer productivity, happiness, and efficiency.
• You have a point of view on how teams evolve from 5 → 10 → 20 engineers.
• You are AI-pilled but wise enough to leverage the right tool for the job.
• You don’t have years of leadership experience.
• You want to redesign the org before understanding it.
• You rely on heavy process to create alignment.
• You don’t enjoy concretely defining major new features given the system’s constraints.
• You need to be the smartest person in the room on every technical decision.
• You prefer large teams, clear layers, and well-defined roles.
• You haven’t worked in a small, fast-moving environment.
• You’re not genuinely interested in using AI to evolve how teams operate.

Nice To Haves

• If your instinct is to earn trust, bring clarity, and help a strong team operate at a much higher level, we should talk.

Responsibilities

• Product + engineering alignment: Help define what’s worth building and why, and how we build product. Bring rigor to opportunities: size, impact, tradeoffs, constraints. Push for clarity before execution. In engineering rooms, you may not be the deepest technical voice. In product rooms, you usually will and you find that asymmetry productive, not awkward.
• Planning and execution quality: Lead strong shaping and planning for cycles. Identify risks early and force hard tradeoffs upfront. Improve consistency of shipping without adding drag.
• Team leadership and development: Support a highly autonomous team without micromanaging. Build trust, context, and alignment. Help engineers grow in ownership and capability.
• Cross-functional leadership: Translate complexity into clear decisions. Ensure engineers understand the “why” behind priorities. Collaborate deeply with product, growth, and operations.
• Technical engagement (without becoming the bottleneck): Engage meaningfully in architecture, scoping, and risk. Ask good questions and surface tradeoffs. Trust the team’s context rather than prescribing solutions.
• AI evolution: Lead us to continually deepen our adoption of AI (paired with human judgement and taste) in how we build. Identify where AI meaningfully improves the product. Increase leverage of a small team.

Benefits

• Compensation: $180,000 to $240,000 base salary, plus equity. For an exceptional candidate with the right startup scaling experience, we may stretch beyond this range.

What This Job Offers

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