Director of Engineering

Summary

Join Valimail as their Director of Engineering, a role blending deep technical expertise with leadership of high-performing teams across application development, platform infrastructure, and shared services. Reporting to the VP of Product, you will shape and scale the engineering organization while remaining actively involved in technical decisions. This position is ideal for a technical leader who enjoys hands-on engineering work and strategic oversight. You will mentor engineers, define architectural direction, and foster a culture of speed, quality, and continuous improvement. You will also play a key role in shaping the engineering organization's structure, culture, and operational maturity. The role involves balancing technical depth with strategic oversight.

Requirements

• 10+ years of engineering experience, including time as a senior technical contributor and 2 – 4+ years in an engineering leadership capacity
• Demonstrated success leading teams building distributed systems, SaaS applications, or cloud infrastructure
• Hands-on experience with at least one of our core tech areas: Ruby, Go, SRE practices, AWS/Azure
• Deep technical judgment — you can challenge assumptions, design for scale, and stay hands-on when needed
• Strong communicator capable of simplifying complex ideas and building trust across functions
• Experienced in hiring, mentoring, and developing engineers at different stages of their careers
• Comfortable working in an agile, iterative environment where speed and business impact matter — but not at the expense of quality
• Committed to diversity, inclusion, and fostering psychological safety within engineering teams

Responsibilities

• Contribute to architectural planning, deep-dive on technical design decisions, and unblock complex engineering challenges
• Maintain a strong connection to code, systems, and tools, providing hands-on guidance when necessary
• Ensure systems are scalable, secure, and reliable to support our global customer base
• Promote a culture of curiosity, experimentation, and continuous improvement
• Stay up to date with emerging technologies and assess their relevance to our stack
• Create space for innovation and new ideas within the engineering org
• Translate business strategy into actionable engineering plans and execution priorities
• Partner closely with R&D leadership to evolve Valimail’s platform and technology vision
• Influence broader company decisions with technical insight and engineering realities
• Serve as a trusted partner to product, design, and business stakeholders
• Communicate technical direction clearly across audiences — from engineers to executives
• Ensure visibility and transparency around engineering progress, blockers, and outcomes
• Lead a team of ~15 engineers across web app, platform, and shared tech (cloud, database, site reliability engineering)
• Scale the engineering organization in line with company growth including hiring, onboarding, and career development
• Foster a strong, inclusive engineering culture that encourages collaboration, growth, and excellence
• Improve processes for delivery, quality, and incident response
• Implement and evolve Agile and DevOps practices to drive efficient, resilient development
• Ensure engineering practices support both speed and long-term maintainability

Benefits

• Highly competitive pay + participation in employee stock option plan
• The anticipated salary range for this role is $220,000 - 250,000 and will also include a bonus plan of $20,000 - $30,000
• You will also be able to participate in our equity incentive plan
• Comprehensive health, dental, + vision coverage
• Six weeks of paid parental leave for all parents, and an additional 6 weeks for parents giving birth
• Remote First Company, you can work anywhere within the US
• Unlimited and flexible PTO. We believe balanced, happy, relaxed people do better work