Director of Engineering

Director of Engineering Level: L8 — Director

Polly
· San Francisco, CA
· Hybrid (Mon / Tues / Thu on-site)

You're a hands-on engineering leader with a deep technical foundation and a track record of owning delivery across more than one product at a time. You've spent years writing and shipping production software, and you've grown into leadership — but you lead from close to the work, directly managing and developing a team of engineers rather than running a layer of managers beneath you.

You're excited by a hyper-growth, fast-paced, industry-disrupting SaaS company, a modern tech stack, and emerging technologies, and you want ownership over a portfolio of products where your decisions have direct, visible impact.

In this role you'll own engineering across multiple products, serving as the single point of engineering accountability for each of them. You'll directly lead a team of senior and staff engineers — setting technical direction, guiding architecture, and staying close enough to the code to raise the quality bar yourself. There's no intervening layer of team leads: you own the technical health, delivery, and growth of your engineers directly, and you keep the portfolio moving as one platform rather than a set of silos.

• Own engineering execution and delivery across multiple products — setting technical direction and serving as the single point of engineering accountability for each, ensuring they ship robust, scalable software on time and at a high quality bar.
• Directly lead, mentor, and develop a team of senior and staff engineers across the US — owning hiring, performance feedback, career development, and day-to-day technical guidance without an intervening management layer.
• Set and maintain a coherent technical vision across products that may have grown up independently — aligning architecture, standards, and roadmaps so the portfolio operates as one platform.
• Balance breadth and depth: context-switch across multiple product domains while staying close enough to each to guide design decisions and step in on the hardest problems.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Design, the AI/ML team, and other leaders to translate business goals into clear technical roadmaps and measurable outcomes across your products.
• Provide technical oversight across distributed systems, APIs, data pipelines, and core application components — guiding architecture and design, and contributing directly when the problem warrants it.
• Prioritize and sequence work across competing products — making pragmatic tradeoffs on resourcing, timelines, and technical investment, and communicating them clearly to leadership.
• Drive operational excellence across every product you own: monitor and analyze system performance to optimize for reliability, scalability, efficiency, and maintainability.
• Champion the adoption of AI-powered tools and workflows within your team, driving productivity improvements and helping engineers adapt to an increasingly AI-augmented development environment.
• Contribute to the broader technical and organizational vision of Polly's platform, driving innovation and excellence across back-end and full-stack solutions.
• Uphold engineering best practices — code reviews, testing, and the highest quality standards — across every product in your remit.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years of professional software development experience, with a strong foundation in backend technologies (Python/Django) and familiarity with modern JavaScript frameworks such as Vue or React.
• 4+ years managing engineers, including directly managing and developing senior and/or staff engineers — performance feedback, mentorship, hiring, and career development.
• Demonstrated ownership of multiple products or product lines at the same time, with a track record of delivering complex software at scale across more than one domain.
• Comfort operating as a hands-on leader — able to lead and develop a team directly, without relying on a layer of team leads, and technical enough to guide architecture and review code.
• Strong understanding of API design, development, and…