Director, Engineering

About the role

Nexcess provides specialty cloud solutions for organizations where performance and compliance have to coexist. We serve businesses worldwide, from agencies scaling client sites to enterprises running mission-critical operations. We've built our reputation on deep technical expertise and genuine partnership with every client we work with. Behind every environment we manage is a team of people who take the craft seriously and keep showing up when it matters. Overview You will run and own the product engineering organization end to end: their architecture, delivery, and engineering roadmap. You are here to build and enable an engineering organization that ships fast and reliably, and how much of it is AI-efficiently enabled.

How we work

Business alignment and focus come first. Engineering here exists to move the business. Key Performance Indicators Speed: DORA metrics with High/Elite as the target.Predictable, reliable delivery of quality software.AI adoption and its impact.

Responsibilities

• Product and delivery Own architecture design, delivery and engineering roadmap for your teams.
• Build the partnership with Product: shape it together, commit to it, and then deliver it.
• Run delivery on monthly cycles with an explicit cut line.
• Scope, design and deliver demonstrable value each month.
• Your teams must have an evidence backed ability to meet commitments rather than explained afterwards.
• Organization and people Design teams that deliver. Draw team boundaries so a team can finish its work without waiting on any other team.
• One accountable Engineering Manager per team, so the owner of any piece of work is known the moment it arrives.
• Build the manager bench. Hire, develop, and calibrate engineering managers, own the hiring bar, and know who is ready to run each team.
• Coach them to lead rather than code.

Qualifications

• 12+ years in software engineering, including 5+ leading engineering teams, and experience leading managers.
• Evidence you have made an engineering organization measurably faster. You instrumented DORA or an equivalent, you know your before-and-after numbers, and can walk through what you changed and what broke while it settled.
• Real, hands-on AI-assisted engineering at organizational scale, with impact you can quantify. Not a pilot and not a vendor rollout: adoption driven across teams, agentic tooling you use yourself every week, your own harness you can describe, and a clear view of where it fails and what to verify. Bring the evidence: the harness you run, a skill you wrote and shared, a spec an agent executed, the review gates you shipped.
• Experience redesigning how teams and work are organized: boundaries, ownership, cadence, and living with the result.
• Delivered and modernized complex software through multiple teams, including reassessing scope or dates with senior stakeholders and absorbing the consequences.
• Hands-on enough to review a design, read a change and hold a defensible technical position without owning the implementation.
• Owned a hiring plan end to end and held a bar; run software in production with real accountability for availability; led remote teams across time zones with vendor squads inside them, on agreements you shaped.
• Managed hosting, cloud or another high-availability service business is a must.

Skills

• Depth in any single technology matters less than the judgment to specify, verify and decide; AI supplies the syntax and the reference. These are the areas we