Director of Engineering

About the role

We're at an inflection point. For two years a small, senior team has built and shipped the core platform without a formal engineering manager — and it worked. But as we hire more engineers, we need someone to set the bar, own the process, and make sure the team gets better as it grows. This is a hands-on leadership role: you'll stay close to the code and the architecture while you formalize our standards, run hiring, and keep us shipping reliable software every week. You'll report directly to the founder and own engineering as a function. At six months, the benchmark is a team that ships faster and breaks things less than before you joined.

What you'll do

• Lead, hire, and grow a team of full-stack engineers — write job specs, run interviews, set ramp targets, and manage performance through regular 1:1s and quarterly reviews
• Define and enforce engineering standards: PR review criteria, deployment gates, branch strategy, and what "done" actually means before something is called shipped
• Lead architecture decisions for our multi-tenant data model and API layer as we scale to 10x current customer load
• Establish incident response process and on-call rotation; own system reliability as an SLA you're personally accountable for
• Partner with product on quarterly planning — push back with technical tradeoffs, not just order-take the roadmap
• Stay hands-on: review code, weigh in on hard design calls, and unblock engineers who are stuck
• Report on engineering health to the founders each week: velocity, reliability, debt load, and what the team needs next
• Build the hiring pipeline and interview loop so we can staff up without slowing down what we're already shipping

What we're looking for

• 7+ years building software, including 2+ years managing engineers — not just mentoring, but writing reviews, setting direction, and making hard calls
• Hands-on background in C# / .NET or a comparable backend stack — you can read a PR, spot a schema design smell, and weigh in on a threading bug without delegating
• Led a team through at least one significant architectural change: a replatform, a major migration, or a scaling event with real production pressure
• Demonstrated track record of raising team quality over time — engineers who worked for you got better at the craft
• Clear, direct communicator: you can tell someone their PR isn't ready and explain precisely why without it becoming a thing

Nice to have

• Experience scaling an engineering team from 3 to 10+ without losing speed or culture
• Background in ERP, inventory, accounting, or B2B SaaS
• Comfort with multi-tenant data design and SQLite / EF Core
• Experience running a lightweight RFC or architecture decision record process