Director, Software Engineering

Description

Hi, We’re App Folio

We’re innovators, changemakers, and collaborators. We’re more than just a software company – we’re pioneers in cloud and AI who deliver magical experiences that make our customers’ lives easier. We’re revolutionizing how people do business in the real estate industry, and we want your ideas, enthusiasm, and passion to help us keep innovating.

The Director of Engineering, Developer Productivity will manage and continue to grow a world-class platform engineering organization for our award-winning products. You will drive the successful delivery of the internal developer platform (IDP) and developer tools while contributing to the overarching engineering strategy, architecture, and roadmap.

This opportunity is ideal for an engineering leader who specializes in Platform Engineering and Developer Experience (Dev Ex). You won’t just be maintaining legacy scripts; you will lead the teams responsible for architecting and scaling our proprietary internal development ecosystem. You will oversee the network of services—including a unified deployment engine, a front-end service layer, and a comprehensive CI/automation suite—ensuring that every engineer in our organization can ship code that is secure, compliant, and high-quality at high velocity.

We are looking for a forward-thinking leader who can also harness the power of today’s AI advancements to revolutionize the SDLC, automating code reviews, test generation, and deployment health checks at scale.

The location for the position is Santa Barbara, CA or San Diego.

• Set the technical direction for the Internal Developer Platform, ensuring seamless "Golden Paths" for developers across distributed microservices.

• Oversee the engineering of the Front-End Service Layer (FSL), ensuring a unified, high-performance UI framework and component library that bridges the gap between design and production.

• Act as the primary technical counterpart for SRE and Security teams, translating reliability and compliance requirements into automated, invisible guardrails within the developer workflow.

• Build automated Deployment and Delivery frameworks that enable high-confidence releases through canary deployments, blue-green shifts, and automated rollbacks.

• Partner with Info Sec and SRE to ensure all delivery pipelines adhere to SOC 2, secure supply chain standards (SLSA), and automated vulnerability scanning.

• Advocate for a SMART codebase (Simple, Maintainable, Agile, Refactored, and Tested) to deliver a SAFE platform (Secure, Available, Fast, and Easy).

• Drive the strategy for integrating AI/ML models into the developer workflow to identify flaky tests, suggest code optimizations, and automate complex infrastructure-as-code (IaC) migrations that manual efforts miss.

• Recruit, screen, and close high-caliber engineering talent, scaling three distinct current teams:
  Deployment/Delivery, Front-End Service Layer, and CI/Dev Tooling and a potential future backend development team.

• Lead, coach, and support a team of passionate platform engineers, creating an environment of creativity and speed while maintaining the discipline required for foundational infrastructure.

• Instill a sense of Product Ownership over the developer experience, ensuring the team treats internal developers as Tier-1 customers.

• Build trusting relationships with Product Management and SRE teams to align platform resources with company strategy, balancing immediate developer needs with long-term architectural investments.

• Experience with GetDX, Jelly Fish, or other developer metrics used to continuously improve the developer experience and productivity

• BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related technical discipline.

• 8+ years of hands-on software development experience building enterprise SaaS or cloud-based platforms.

• 5+ years of demonstrated success hiring, managing, and retaining world-class engineering teams.

• Proven track record leading platform or "Engineering Excellence" teams…