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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Director of Software Engineering

💰 $ - $

EngineeringLeadershipSoftware DevelopmentTechnology

🎯 Role Definition

The Director of Software Engineering is a senior leadership role responsible for defining and delivering the technical vision, building and scaling high-performing engineering teams, and ensuring reliable, secure, and maintainable software delivery. This role blends technical architecture oversight, people leadership, product partnership, and operational accountability across the software development lifecycle. Ideal candidates bring deep experience with cloud-native architectures, microservices, CI/CD, and a strong track record of scaling engineering organizations and delivering business outcomes.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Engineering Manager with end-to-end product delivery experience
  • Principal Engineer or Staff Engineer who has demonstrated leadership and cross-functional influence
  • Head of Engineering / Group Engineering Manager at a smaller company or startup

Advancement To:

  • Vice President of Engineering
  • Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
  • Head of Platform / Global Engineering

Lateral Moves:

  • Director of Product Engineering
  • Director of Technical Program Management
  • Director of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Define and communicate a five-quarter to two-year engineering strategy aligned to company objectives, translating business goals into technical roadmaps, measurable OKRs, and prioritized engineering initiatives.
  • Lead and grow multiple engineering teams (managers, tech leads, senior engineers), recruiting top talent, setting hiring plans, and instituting career ladders, performance reviews, and promotion criteria to scale engineering capability.
  • Own technical architecture direction and product platform decisions for cloud-native systems, microservices, APIs, and infrastructure-as-code to ensure scalability, reliability, security, and cost efficiency.
  • Drive continuous improvement of the end-to-end software delivery lifecycle by implementing best-in-class CI/CD pipelines, automated testing strategies, observability (APM/monitoring/logging), and release management practices.
  • Partner with Product Management and Design to define product roadmaps, scope technical feasibility, estimate delivery timelines, and align engineering priorities with market and customer needs.
  • Establish and enforce engineering standards, coding best practices, design reviews, and technical documentation to improve maintainability and reduce technical debt across codebases.
  • Define and manage departmental budgets including headcount planning, vendor contracts, cloud costs, and capital expenditures to optimize resource allocation and operating efficiency.
  • Champion security and compliance programs (e.g., encryption, IAM, GDPR, SOC2) by integrating security engineering into the SDLC and collaborating with InfoSec and Legal teams.
  • Introduce and scale observability, SLOs/SLIs, incident management and post-incident review processes to reduce mean time to detection/recovery and improve system reliability.
  • Lead cross-functional initiatives to integrate engineering work with sales, marketing, customer success, and support to accelerate product adoption and improve customer outcomes.
  • Mentor engineering managers and senior engineers to build leadership capacity, improve technical decision-making, and foster an inclusive, high-performance culture.
  • Establish metrics and dashboards (delivery velocity, code quality, incident trends, cycle time) and use data to drive decisions, identify bottlenecks, and measure team health.
  • Oversee vendor and partner relationships (cloud providers, middleware, third-party services), negotiating SLAs and ensuring vendor solutions align with technical and business needs.
  • Design and execute migration strategies for legacy systems to modern platforms (cloud migrations, re-platforming, containerization) while minimizing business disruption.
  • Drive platform and infrastructure initiatives to reduce toil, standardize tooling, and enable developer productivity through internal platforms, SDKs, and self-service tools.
  • Lead roadmap tradeoff conversations and prioritize technical investments (refactors, scalability, performance) against feature development and time-to-market constraints.
  • Promote and operationalize DevOps and SRE practices across engineering teams to increase deployment frequency and system resilience.
  • Manage legal, regulatory, and risk considerations that impact engineering deliverables (data residency, accessibility, export controls) and ensure product compliance.
  • Serve as a visible ambassador for engineering, representing technical direction to executive leadership, board members, customers, and industry events.
  • Drive cost optimization efforts across engineering — cloud spend, licensing, and third-party services — while maintaining service levels and development velocity.
  • Oversee onboarding and knowledge transfer programs to reduce time-to-contribution for new hires and minimize single points of failure in institutional knowledge.
  • Lead performance and capacity planning initiatives for critical services, ensuring architecture can support projected growth and traffic spikes.
  • Foster a culture of experimentation, continuous learning, and innovation by promoting technical R&D, hackathons, brown-bag sessions, and external certifications.
  • Ensure cross-team alignment by facilitating program-level planning, dependency management, and release orchestration for multi-team deliveries.
  • Act as escalation point for major incidents, coordinating executive communications, and directing remediation and long-term corrective action.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration with Data Science, Analytics, and ML teams to ensure product integration and production readiness.
  • Support vendor selection for analytics and monitoring tools and participate in contract review.
  • Advise on data governance, access controls, and data lineage to support compliance and analytics quality.
  • Provide mentorship to data engineering leads and assist in recruiting and interviewing specialized technical roles.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Technical leadership and architecture: proven experience designing and owning large-scale, distributed, cloud-native architectures (AWS, GCP, Azure) and microservices-based systems.
  • Software delivery: deep knowledge of Agile methodologies, sprint planning, program-level delivery, and release management practices.
  • DevOps and CI/CD: hands-on experience building and scaling continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI).
  • Observability and reliability: expertise with monitoring and logging tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK) and implementing SLO/SLI-based reliability programs.
  • Cloud infrastructure and automation: proficiency with IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation), containerization (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes).
  • Security and compliance: understanding of secure coding practices, identity and access management, encryption, and compliance frameworks such as SOC2, ISO27001, and GDPR.
  • Data and analytics integration: familiarity with data pipelines, event-driven architectures, streaming (Kafka), and collaboration with data engineering teams.
  • Performance and scalability: experience with performance tuning, capacity planning, caching strategies, and CDN integrations.
  • System design and code quality: strong background in reviewing high-level designs, establishing coding standards, and championing automated testing frameworks.
  • Budgeting and vendor management: experience managing cloud costs, third-party contracts, and vendor negotiation.
  • Technical recruiting and talent development: track record of hiring senior engineers and building engineering career frameworks.
  • Incident response and crisis management: practical experience running incident command, root cause analysis, and implementing long-term fixes.
  • API strategy and integrations: designing robust, versioned APIs and partner integrations, including REST/GraphQL/gRPC best practices.
  • Observability of business metrics: ability to link engineering KPIs to business outcomes and customer metrics.

Soft Skills

  • Strategic leadership: ability to create and sell a multi-quarter technical vision and align engineering work to business strategy.
  • Communication: clear, persuasive communicator with experience presenting to executives, board members, customers, and technical teams.
  • Cross-functional collaboration: skilled at building strong partnerships with Product, Design, Sales, Customer Success, and Security teams.
  • People management and coaching: proven mentor and developer of engineering managers, with a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
  • Decision-making under uncertainty: strong judgment for prioritization, trade-offs, and risk/benefit analysis in ambiguous situations.
  • Stakeholder management: experience balancing competing priorities across leadership, customers, and product teams.
  • Change management: effective at driving organizational change, process improvements, and adoption of new tooling or practices.
  • Influencing and negotiation: ability to negotiate scope, timelines, and resources with internal and external stakeholders.
  • Problem solving and systems thinking: holistic thinker who uncovers root causes and designs durable solutions.
  • Time and resource prioritization: adept at focusing engineering efforts on high-leverage initiatives and measurable outcomes.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree (MS) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, MBA, or equivalent advanced technical/business degree.
  • Professional certifications in cloud platforms (AWS Certified Solutions Architect, GCP Professional Cloud Architect, Azure Solutions Architect) are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Computer Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Mathematics or Applied Physics (beneficial)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with at least 5 years in engineering leadership or management roles (Engineering Manager, Senior Manager, Head of Engineering).

Preferred:

  • 12+ years of software development experience and 7+ years managing multi-team engineering organizations.
  • Demonstrated experience leading platform migrations, building global engineering teams, and scaling SaaS products in high-growth environments.
  • Experience with enterprise-grade compliance programs, security reviews, and public cloud cost optimization.
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