Director of Engineering

First Due’s mission is to prevent first responder injury or death by providing fire and EMS agencies with transformative, end-to-end software solutions that empower them to run safer, smarter, and more effective operations.

Location
:
Remote - US Only
Country
:
United States
Department
:
Engineering
Reports To
: SVP, Engineering
Position Type
:
Full-Time
Salary
: $240,000 + Bonus

First Due is seeking a strategic and people-focused Director of Engineering to lead and scale our engineering organization. This role is responsible for developing engineering leaders and teams, defining technical and operational strategy, driving delivery excellence, and ensuring the successful execution of our product roadmap.

The Director of Engineering will partner closely with Product, Design, Customer Success, and executive leadership to align engineering investments with business priorities while fostering a culture of innovation, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement. The ideal candidate is an experienced engineering leader who can go deep with individual team performance and delivery yet has successfully managed managers and engineering teams within a high-growth SaaS environment and can effectively balance long-term technical vision with day-to-day execution.

Engineering Leadership & Team Development

• Understand our products, how customers use them, and be able to go deep with individual teams to optimize their delivery with broader PDLC stakeholders
• Hire, Lead, mentor, and develop Engineering Managers and technical leaders, fostering a high-performance culture focused on accountability, growth, and execution.
• Build and scale a world-class engineering organization through hiring, succession planning, talent development, and organizational design.
• Establish clear performance expectations and provide ongoing coaching, feedback, and career development opportunities.
• Promote employee engagement, collaboration, inclusion, and continuous learning across the engineering organization.
• Drive organizational health, retention, and team effectiveness through thoughtful leadership and management practices.

Delivery & Execution

• Own engineering execution and delivery against company objectives, product roadmaps, and strategic initiatives.
• Partner with Product and Design leadership to establish priorities, staffing plans, and delivery timelines.
• Drive predictable software delivery through effective planning, resource allocation, estimation, and prioritization.
• Monitor engineering metrics and delivery performance to identify opportunities for increased velocity, quality, and operational efficiency.
• Ensure effective communication and alignment across distributed teams and stakeholders.

Technical & Architectural Leadership

• Partner with engineering leaders to define and evolve technical strategy, architecture, scalability, security, and platform reliability.
• Provide leadership on major architectural decisions, technical investments, and platform modernization efforts.
• Ensure engineering teams maintain high standards for software quality, maintainability, performance, and security.
• Support evaluation of emerging technologies, tools, and development practices that improve business outcomes and engineering effectiveness.
• Balance short-term business objectives with long-term platform health and technical sustainability.

Operational Excellence

• Establish and continuously improve engineering processes, development standards, testing practices, CI/CD pipelines, and release management procedures.
• Oversee production operations, incident management, root cause analysis, and service reliability practices.
• Ensure teams maintain strong operational readiness through monitoring,…