Director of Engineering

About the role

Reporting to the VP of Engineering, the Director of Engineering is responsible for both the strategic and tactical leadership of RocketRez's engineering organization. You'll directly manage four Engineering Team Leads — each owning a team of developers (and QA engineers) — and through them, set goals, prioritize projects, and hire on an as-needed basis.

You'll collaborate with cross-departmental teams to help guide the success of RocketRez and the Rocket Office Team, use data and customer research to understand and validate top priorities, conceptualize strategies, and work with your Team Leads to define and clarify work packages for their teams to execute, then measure success. On the tactical side, you'll stay actively involved in shaping new products, identifying requirements, and setting timelines alongside your Team Leads.

Location: Based out of Canada or the US (remote).

Responsibilities

Delivery Management

• Optimize your org around autonomous teams delivering incrementally and at a consistently high cadence.
• Coordinate across team members and teams — through your Team Leads — to keep initiatives moving to completion.
• Execute strategies for future development projects based on the company's overall objectives and resources.
• Partner with product management in setting requirements, goals, and timelines.
• Participate in technical design and architecture decisions that span multiple teams.
• Enforce engineering standards for code quality, testing, and release practices, in partnership with your Team Leads.
• Ensure QA is embedded early in the development lifecycle rather than treated as a final gate.

People Management & Recruitment

• Directly manage and coach Engineering Team Leads, holding them accountable for their teams' delivery, quality, and people management.
• Own performance management and career development for the Team Lead layer.
• Hire engineers and coordinate their training, partnering with your Team Leads and with People.
• Build a consistent leadership rhythm across teams (1:1s, team meetings, skip-levels) that develop the Team Leads into stronger managers over time.

Stakeholder & Inter-Departmental Management

• Coordinate with external stakeholders for new integrations and tools (e.g., Product).
• Work with your team and cross-functional partners to define and influence strategy and roadmap execution (e.g., Product).
• Collaborate across functions, drive engineering initiatives, and have an impact at an organizational level.

Operations Management

• Work through Engineering Team Leads to ensure the reliability and performance of all systems they own and drive improvements.
• Manage engineering’s response process to incidents and ensure we have appropriate technical coverage through cross training, on call scheduling and runbooks.

Leadership

• Foster a culture of ownership, technical craftsmanship, and speed across all four teams.
• Report progress, risks, and tradeoffs to the VP of Engineering and other stakeholders.

Requirements

• 8+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years managing engineering managers or leads (not only individual contributors).
• A track record of leading multi-team organizations that include both developers and QA.
• Experience improving delivery cadence and predictability with high quality in a SaaS/product environment.
• Strong technical judgment — comfortable reviewing architecture and tradeoffs without necessarily writing code day to day.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills; comfortable partnering with Product and executive leadership.
• Experience hiring and developing engineering leaders.

Pay

Salary range: $180,000-$200,000 CAD or $185,000-$205,000 USD.

Benefits

• Generous paid time off because we know a healthy work-life balance is key.
• Retirement benefits, health insurance, and supportive parental leave.
• Diversity and inclusion: we hire from and for a wide range of backgrounds to bring unique perspectives to our team.

Core Values:

• Win with Integrity
• Honest Dialogue
• Always Assume Positive Intent
• People Come First
• Continuous Improvement Mindset
• Teamwork Drives Results