Director of Engineering - Marketplace and Auctions

Director of Engineering - Marketplace and Auctions

We are seeking an experienced and visionary Director of Engineering to lead engineering excellence across our high-impact product vertical of Marketplace and Auctions products at a fast-growing, AI-first SaaS company. This is a senior leadership role at the intersection of people, technology, and delivery — responsible for shaping how we build, who builds it, and how fast we move.

You will own the full technical lifecycle of your vertical: from architecture and system design to team performance and delivery cadence. You will be a champion for modern AI Engineering Development Methodology, embedding AI-assisted workflows, tooling, and thinking into the DNA of your teams.

• Own end-to-end technical strategy for your product vertical, aligning architecture decisions with business and product goals
• Drive system design, scalability planning, and architectural governance across your engineering teams
• Establish and evolve engineering standards, patterns, and best practices for a cloud-native, SaaS environment
• Lead technical design reviews, ensuring quality, security, and performance considerations are embedded from inception
• Evaluate and introduce emerging technologies — particularly AI/ML platforms, LLM integrations, and AI-enabled developer tooling

• Hire, develop, and retain high-performing engineering talent across multiple squads or pods within your vertical
• Build a culture of psychological safety, continuous learning, and engineering craft
• Provide coaching, career development, and growth paths for engineers at all levels (IC to Staff/Principal)
• Foster an inclusive team environment that values diverse perspectives and ways of working
• Manage engineering managers and/or senior technical leads, investing in their development as leaders

• Own delivery outcomes for your vertical — velocity, quality, reliability, and predictability
• Partner with Product Management to translate roadmaps into technical plans with clear milestones and risk identification
• Drive agile or continuous delivery practices, continuously improving team flow and cycle times
• Define and track engineering KPIs (DORA metrics, defect rates, on-call burden, etc.) and hold teams accountable to them
• Oversee incident response, post-mortems, and systemic reliability improvements

• Champion AI Engineering Development Methodology across your vertical, including:
• AI-assisted code generation, review, and documentation workflows (e.g., Git Hub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code)
• LLM integration patterns, RAG architectures, and AI-powered product features
• Prompt engineering and evaluation frameworks embedded in the SDLC
• AI observability, responsible AI practices, and guardrails in production systems
• Drive experiments with agentic engineering workflows to accelerate development throughput
• Stay current with the AI/ML ecosystem and serve as a thought partner to CTO and product leadership on AI strategy

Required Experience

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in engineering leadership roles
• Proven track record managing engineering managers and multi-team organizations
• Experience working in a high-growth B2B SaaS or large-scale enterprise environment with multi-tenant architecture
• Deep experience building and scaling SaaS products in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Strong foundation in distributed systems, API design, data architecture, and Dev Ops/SRE practices
• Demonstrated ability to balance technical vision with practical delivery execution
• Track record of building and sustaining high-performing, inclusive engineering cultures

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AI Engineering Development Methodology, LLMOps, or AI-native product development
• Familiarity with modern AI tooling:
  Lang Chain, llama
  
  Index, vector databases, fine-tuning workflows
• Hands-on experience integrating AI/ML capabilities into commercial software products
• Background in building platform capabilities (internal developer platforms, shared services)
• Prior experience as a…