Director, Engineering

Stratus, deriving from the Latin term meaning 'layer', offers an advanced set of MEP-specific solutions that seamlessly layer across a contractor's entire workflow from design to fabrication to installation. Our team of seasoned industry experts, skilled technology leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs understands that fabrication does not occur in isolation, and increasingly, it may not happen within your own fabrication shop. Through close relationships with our customers — who include some of the most innovative and largest MEP contractors — we have developed a suite of Stratus tools to digitize, automate, and optimize piping, plumbing, sheet metal, and electrical contracting. Stratus provides the software layer an MEP contractor needs to optimize profits with true "Data-Driven Contracting."

About the Role

The growth is proven. Stratus has built a platform customers depend on and a market that is accelerating. The next chapter is scale and compounding value: more customers, deeper workflows, and an AI layer that gives MEP fabrication shops capabilities they could not build on their own. You will be among the first engineering leaders to put a genuine AI agent into a fabrication workflow that a real shop floor runs on. That has not been done at scale. This role is where it gets built. And you will build it while keeping the core product shipping to a rapidly growing customer base. You will need to hold both. You will report to the CTO, peer with Directors and Senior Directors across engineering, and partner day to day with the Head of Product and GTM leadership. This role is fully remote. We meet quarterly as a leadership team and make regular visits to customer shop floors. You will know what your software looks like when it is running in a real fabrication environment.

Responsibilities

• Lead product-focused teams delivering against the Stratus roadmap, bringing engineering and AI capability together to ship what customers depend on.
• Own engineering delivery: what ships, the cadence, clearing the path, and holding the bar for quality.
• Build customer empathy and connection by engaging directly with fabrication shop floors to understand real workflows and challenges.
• Translate real workflow problems into solutions that stick, using engineering judgment to determine when to build targeted features, make architectural changes, or simplify.
• Partner with the CTO and engineering leadership on platform decisions across Azure and MongoDB Atlas, including the move toward agentic surfaces.
• Foster an AI-driven engineering culture where AI enhances every stage of the development cycle, from design to production deploy.
• Uphold and improve engineering standards, including CI/CD, code review culture, observability, and incident learning.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Data, and Customer Success teams to ensure customer needs drive development.

Requirements

• 10+ years in software engineering, including direct experience building and shipping AI-enabled products in production.
• 5+ years in engineering leadership at a SaaS product company, with a track record of scaling teams and delivering high-impact solutions.
• Experience shipping in fast-growing environments where a bad release has real consequences.
• Proven ability to nurture teams to higher impact without disrupting existing workflows.
• Experience hiring and developing exceptional talent.
• Strong customer and product orientation, with the ability to identify real problems beneath stated requests and drive outcomes.
• Cloud-native SaaS architecture experience, preferably with Azure. Comfortable with C# or .NET.
• MongoDB or document database experience is a plus.

Skills

• AI-forward and pragmatic engineering: experience leading teams shipping AI features that customers depend on in production.
• Strong technical depth with a focus on reliability, build vs. buy decisions, and shipping AI customers trust.
• Leadership experience, including strong communication skills and the ability to work with distributed and cross-functional teams.
• Customer and product orientation, with a focus on value shipped over tasks completed.
• Domain experience (strong plus): MEP, fabrication, or construction technology.
• Nice to have: Experience with Autodesk or similar, exposure to manufacturing/supply chain/field operations software, hands-on experience with LangGraph, MCP, or agentic orchestration frameworks.

Benefits

• Comprehensive and competitive health benefits plan.
• Matching 401k contributions.
• 20 days annual PTO.
• Primarily remote work with occasional annual team onsites.

Stratus participates in E-Verify. After you join the team, we'll verify your eligibility to work in the U.S. by submitting information from your Form I-9 to the Social Security Administration and, if needed, the Department of Homeland Security.