Director of Engineering Identity Platform

This position may be a hybrid or fully remote role, as determined by your manager. If hybrid, you’ll work remotely from home and in an office, so you must live within commuting distance. If fully remote, you’ll work from home and may occasionally visit a GoDaddy office for team events or meetings. This role is not eligible for candidates in Alaska, Mississippi, North Dakota, or the Virgin Islands, and is not currently considering applicants from California, Seattle, or NYC.

About the role

GoDaddy's Identity Platform powers authentication, authorization, and core identity infrastructure, which sits at the heart of how millions of small businesses securely access, manage, and grow their online presence across our products. We’re looking for a Director of Engineering to lead this critical platform into its next chapter — driving company-wide adoption of OAuth/OpenID Connect (OIDC) and OpenFGA, strengthening the reliability and security of core identity services, and crafting customer experiences that are flawless, scalable, and trusted.

In this role, you’ll set the technical vision and execution rhythm for a 50+ person engineering organization spanning the US and India. You will lead through multiple Senior Managers while staying close to the technology. This is a hands-on leadership role — we expect you to code, prototype, run technical experiments, and lead by example in using AI-assisted development tools.

Responsibilities

• Own and set the engineering strategy and lead execution for the platforms that power authentication, authorization, and customer profile management across GoDaddy
• Lead, mentor, and scale a distributed engineering organization of 50+ engineers across the US and India, including multiple Senior Managers
• Stay close to the technology: contribute hands-on, from prototyping and code review to architecture and design discussions — using your technical depth to build credibility and make sharp technical calls
• Champion the effective use of AI-assisted development tools such as Claude, Copilot, Cursor, or similar, in your own work and drive adoption across the organization, while applying good judgment in security-critical environments
• Drive company-wide adoption of modern identity and authorization standards, including OAuth, OpenID Connect, and OpenFGA, partnering across teams to develop migration strategies and influence engineering standards beyond your own organization
• Raise the operational bar for critical systems, improving incident response, on-call health, and monitoring for services used across every GoDaddy product
• Champion identity experiences (passwordless, streamlined authorization) that protect customers while balancing strong security with ease of use

Requirements

• 10+ years' demonstrated experience in software engineering, with recent experience in identity, security, or platform engineering within a global technology environment
• Hands-on experience driving large-scale technical migrations, platform modernization, or engineering standards adoption across a sophisticated engineering organization
• 8+ years' proven experience as a people leader, with a track record of leading and scaling engineering organizations of 20+ engineers through multiple layers of management across distributed teams and geographies
• An ownership mentality, strong customer advocacy in technical decision-making, and the ability to lead teams optimally through ambiguity
• Strong hands-on technical depth across security, identity, access control, or adjacent platform systems, with the ability to deep-dive into identity and authorization concepts, write code, prototype, and lead architecture and design reviews
• Proficiency in a modern backend language such as Java or Python, with solid understanding of broader modern engineering stacks including React, GraphQL, and AWS
• Direct experience with OAuth, OIDC, or fine-grained authorization models such as OpenFGA is highly desirable
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools, including a proven track record in driving adoption across engineering teams and applying good judgment around safe use in security-critical contexts

Nice to have

• Prior ownership of an identity or profile/PII management platform at consumer or e-commerce scale
• Experience leading US/India distributed teams
• Contributions to open standards or open-source identity projects