Director, Engineering

About the Role

We're looking for a Director, Engineering to build our US engineering function from the ground up. Based in Boston or NYC, you'll help open our East Coast office: hiring the initial team, establishing how it runs day to day, and making sure it integrates tightly with our existing UK team rather than drifting into a separate operation with its own culture and priorities.

Responsibilities

• Hire and build Harmonic's first US engineering team from a standing start, sequencing growth across customer engineering, platform, and product roadmap capability based on business need
• Be genuinely hands-on while the team is small - reviewing code, making early technical calls, and stepping in directly where needed - before shifting toward a fuller leadership role as headcount grows
• Design how the US and UK engineering teams actually work together day to day: overlap hours, handoffs, communication norms, and shared rituals, so the US site is one team with the UK rather than a second one
• Own the engineering hiring bar and interview process for the US market, adapting what works in the UK rather than reinventing it from scratch
• Represent the US engineering function to our VP of Engineering and the rest of engineering leadership, and make sure US context and constraints are visible in company-wide planning
• Partner with People/Recruiting on the practical realities of hiring in the US - compensation benchmarking, employment structures, and market norms that differ from the UK
• Build the operational rhythm (planning, delivery, on-call, incident response) that lets the US team ship independently while staying aligned with existing engineering practices

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience managing and leading engineering teams
• A genuine track record of building a US (or other second-site) engineering presence for a company headquartered elsewhere - not just managing a team that already existed when you joined
• Experience hiring engineers from a standing start, not inheriting an existing team and its processes
• Comfort being hands-on early - technically credible enough to make calls and interview deeply technical candidates - with a clear track record of transitioning into fuller leadership as a team scales
• Broad enough technical range to hire well and set direction across customer-facing engineering, platform/infrastructure, and product engineering, even without deep specialism in all three
• Real experience collaborating across time zones with a non-collocated team - ideally specifically with a UK team, so you understand both the practical overlap-hours problem and the cultural texture of working with UK colleagues
• A track record of operating well inside a broader engineering organization led by someone else, rather than needing full autonomy to feel ownership

Benefits

• Competitive pay and meaningful equity - A real stake in Harmonic's success, not a token gesture
• Comprehensive benefits - 401K, pension plan, generous PTO, and flexible hybrid work
• A small, high-trust team that values transparency, creativity, and continuous learning - no politics, no bureaucracy
• Thoughtful leadership - that cares deeply about your growth, not just your output
• Annual global off-sites - past trips include Lisbon, Portugal and Nashville, TN
• Real ownership - you'll shape a new part of the company, its culture, and its direction from day one

Pay

Compensation Range: $230,000 - $270,000