Director of Engineering

Head / Director of Engineering (Player‑Coach)

Location: Remote US
Reports to: CTO
Titles: We’re flexible on leveling between Head of Engineering and Director of Engineering, commensurate with scope and experience.

Why this role exists

We’re a Series-A startup bridging the streaming/batch chasm to offer a unified platform for right-time data replication and transform, with ergonomics that dramatically improve the accessibility of maintaining production-grade data flows. Our hands‑on CTO focuses on 1–2 critical technical bets at a time. You will run the day‑to‑day of engineering: people, delivery, and operations –  so we ship the right things with exceptional reliability.

What you’ll do

• Optimize project delivery. Develop processes and team loops that wrangle the competing needs of customers, partners, marketing, operations, and long-term product vision into a focused and achievable technical pipeline.
   
• Manage and nurture. Grow Estuary’s engineering management culture. Start with ~10 direct reports and tap your experience to layer the right structures and processes at the right time, as Estuary incrementally transitions from a flat org chart to increasingly formalized teams. Improve 360 review process, feedback, and leveling; coach effective 1:1s and be a mentor of mentors.
   
• Partner tightly. Work with CTO/CEO co‑founders (product function), as well as compliance, marketing, sales, and support leads to develop our shared roadmap, refine scope into clear engineering commitments, set expectations, sequence work, and surface risks. Jump on critical customer escalations with judgment.
   
• Operational excellence. Manage on‑call rotations, direct incident response, establish postmortems and ensure follow-through on findings. Actively improve quality standards and risk minimization. Champion Estuary’s “fix bugs first” culture.
   
• Hiring engine. Refine the engineering candidate lifecycle, including top-of-funnel sourcing, early screening and touch points, interview structure, scoring, and onboarding. Work with in-house recruiting to achieve sustainable growth of exceptional hires.
   
• Be a credible player‑coach. You’ll read design docs, ask the right questions, build prototypes, and contribute code occasionally to stay on top of Estuary’s technology stack and pinch hit—this is not a pure people‑ops role.
   
• Advocate Compliance. Partner with our existing compliance lead (SOC 2, HIPAA; HITRUST and PCI DSS exploration) to ensure engineering practices and evidence are audit‑ready.

Qualifications

• 8–12+ years in platform engineering with 3–5+ years leading teams; experience managing 8–20 engineers across 2–4 pods.
   
• Proven ability to lead, introduce structure, and nurture engineering excellence across multiple teams in a complex domain, preferably B2B.
   
• Evidence of hiring and leveling senior ICs and tech leads; manager‑of‑managers experience a plus.
   
• Ability to communicate at all levels, and discuss nuanced technical concepts with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
   
• Experience leading and organizing incident response in high stakes settings.
   
• Familiarity and interest in techniques for building data-intensive applications and platforms, counter-balanced with a bias towards solutions that are as simple as possible.
   
• Comfortable partnering with a highly hands‑on CTO; strong judgment about when to pull them in vs. shield them.

How we work

• High autonomy; engineers own the full feature lifecycle and often engage directly with users.
   
• Remote‑first, Slack‑centric, async‑friendly with VCs as needed
   
• Global team with a skew towards east-coast working hours

Compensation & leveling

Market‑competitive cash + equity; exact title (Head vs. Director) based on experience and scope. Future scope and title growth are based on impact, not tenure