Director of Engineering
Content + Source + Freshness • 16 Dec 2025 • 95% confidence
Offer value
High value due to the role's strategic importance in a high-growth startup, competitive salary, and opportunities for leadership development.
- Competitive salary: $225,000 - $275,000/year
- Influential role in shaping engineering culture
- Focus on team mentoring and process improvement
Pros
- Competitive salary range ($225,000 - $275,000/year)
- Opportunity to shape the engineering culture and processes
- Ability to mentor and grow a team of engineers
Cons
- Startups inherently come with less stability than established firms
- High expectations and pressure for quick results
- Requires hands-on involvement in coding and operational tasks
Who it's for
Senior Level • Remote
Good fit
- Experienced engineering managers
- Leaders passionate about mentoring and team growth
- Individuals eager to implement innovative processes
Not recommended for
- Newcomers in engineering roles
- Those who prefer stable corporate jobs with established processes
- Candidates unwilling to take on hands-on responsibilities
Motivation fit
Key skills
About the job
• Build world-class engineering operations (80% of your focus)
• Set engineering standards: Define and implement standards for code quality, documentation, testing coverage, and architectural review
• Create clarity and alignment: Establish sprint planning, roadmap processes, and priority-setting frameworks so the team operates with clear direction
• Own the release process: Design deployment procedures with proper testing, monitoring, and incident response protocols
• Enable leadership focus: Take ownership of day-to-day technical decision-making and engineering operations, allowing company leadership to focus on strategic initiatives
• Lead and scale the team (20% of your focus)
• Mentor engineers and help them grow their skills and impact
• Build team culture and rituals that support high performance
• Foster collaboration between product, operations, and engineering
• Eventually recruit and hire as we scale beyond our current team
Requirements
- Proven operator: You've built and run engineering teams of 10-50+ people at high-growth startups or infrastructure companies.
- First principles thinker: You adapt best practices from previous roles rather than copy-paste them. You understand the "why" behind processes and tailor solutions to our stage, team size, and needs - not implement a FAANG engineering playbook at a 20-person startup.
- Process builder: You've shipped processes for software development from scratch—CI/CD, testing frameworks, deployment pipelines, on-call rotations, metrics, and more.
- Technical credibility: You can review code, debug production issues, and earn respect from strong engineers. You've written production code in the last 3-5 years and are not afraid to dive into challenge issues.
- Startup velocity: You move fast, prioritize ruthlessly, and aren't afraid to get your hands dirty.
- Low ego: You're here to solve problems, not collect a title. You'll write code, fix bugs, and do whatever it takes.
- Nice-to-haves
- Experience with Rust, distributed systems, or high-performance infrastructure
- Background in crypto/blockchain infrastructure
- Previously scaled engineering from chaos to order at a fast-growing startup
- Operated in extremely high-stakes environments where downtime costs millions
🔍 ATS Optimization Keywords
Below are skills and terms extracted directly from this job posting to improve Applicant Tracking System (ATS) visibility. This unique feature helps candidates tailor their applications more effectively — a feature exclusive to JobTailor job listings.
Hard Skills
- code quality
- documentation
- testing coverage
- architectural review
- CI/CD
- testing frameworks
- deployment pipelines
- on-call rotations
- debugging
- production code
Soft Skills
- leadership
- mentoring
- collaboration
- problem-solving
- adaptability
- prioritization
- team culture building
- communication
- process building
- low ego
