Director of Engineering, Data Platform

Pendo's Data Platform is the backbone of everything we do. Our systems process more than 50 billion events per day, peaking at over 1 million events per second, and manage dozens of petabytes of data across several production environments. The platform powers real-time data ingestion, batch processing, and analytics at scale — and the instrumentation standards that keep our entire codebase observable.

It's built primarily in Go, runs on Google Kubernetes Engine, and relies on Cloud Pub/Sub, Firestore, Google Cloud Storage, Redis, and memcache. We expect the stack to evolve, and you'll help decide how.

We're looking for a Director of Engineering to lead the teams that own this infrastructure. This is a leadership role with real technical depth — you'll set strategy, build and grow high-performing engineering teams, and partner closely with Site Reliability Engineering. You'll stay close enough to the code to review designs, debug production issues, and contribute when it matters. You'll also own the economics of running the platform at this scale and be a trusted voice with customers on performance, data integrity, and reliability.

If you want a role where architectural decisions have immediate business consequence and the technical bar is genuinely high, this is it.

This role is based in Raleigh, NC and follows Pendo's hybrid model: in-office 3 days per week.

• Lead multiple engineering teams responsible for our real-time data ingestion pipeline, analytics batch job pipelines, and analytics query engine — setting technical direction and roadmap while balancing near-term delivery with long-term scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Drive architectural decisions across storage, compute, and data modeling; know when to adopt, build, or retire technologies and make those calls with conviction and clear rationale.
• Own instrumentation standards across the core codebase — structured logging, Open Telemetry metrics and tracing — ensuring teams across the organization can adopt them with minimal friction and that the resulting telemetry is useful, consistent, and cost-conscious.
• Own the cost profile of the data platform at petabyte scale: forecast infrastructure spend for new product initiatives, improve cost attribution by customer, product, feature, and team, and diagnose and resolve cost overruns quickly.
• Partner with SRE on shared on‑call responsibilities, incident response, postmortems, and reliability roadmaps; define and track SLOs for ingestion latency, query performance, and data correctness.
• Serve as a technical authority in customer conversations on platform performance, data integrity, and reliability — translating customer needs and escalations into clear engineering priorities.
• Hire, coach, and develop engineering managers and senior engineers; build a team culture grounded in high standards, clear communication, and continuous improvement.

Beyond the qualifications, we hire through a specific lens. These aren't buzzwords; they're the things we'll actually look for in how you talk about your work.

You're a builder, not a maintainer.

You're most energized when there isn't a clear path yet, and you get to define it. You don't wait for direction; you identify gaps, shape solutions, and drive them forward. At Pendo, great engineering directors don't just manage delivery — they operate as technical owners, setting architectural direction, making cost and reliability tradeoffs visible before they become crises, and building teams that can operate at the same level of ambition.

You're AI-curious — genuinely.

You're not using AI tools occasionally. You're rewiring how you work around them — and you bring that same orientation to your teams. You…