Director of Engineering (Remote)

About the role

We’re hiring a Director of Engineering to build a best-in-class engineering department in a moment of rapid growth; we’ve more than doubled our engineering team in the last year and are continuing to hire.

Your initial focus will be on our cash delivery platform: you'll own the technical systems that deliver the next $4B to people in extreme poverty, our goal for the next nine years, with scenarios on the table that would require us to scale much faster. We recently launched a platform rebuild as a greenfield project, and the work ahead is scaling it from initial launch to delivering billions.

Responsibilities

• Own the engineering organization for our cash delivery platform: its structure, staffing strategy, and operating model — and redesign these as the team grows, including deciding when and how to build out a management layer (today: 6 engineers on the cash delivery platform, 11 engineers total; additional hires planned this year)
• Own multi-year technical strategy for the platform: defining interfaces and boundaries between domains, determining when to build versus buy versus extend, and how to sequence major architectural transitions — driving the biggest bets to a decision with the Platform Product Lead, VP of Technology, and leadership
• Protect and scale the culture as we grow: open debate, product ownership, continuous improvement, and strong engineering foundations
• Own engineering delivery — the commitments leadership and stakeholders plan against, platform reliability, and the trade-offs between roadmap speed and platform investment — in close partnership with the Platform Product Lead
• Drive operational excellence, including on-call, incident response, code quality, testing, AI, and deployment practices
• Represent engineering at the leadership level: translate technical realities into business decisions and vice versa, and partner with diverse stakeholders to create the enabling environment for product development
• Coach and develop engineers through 1:1s, feedback, career planning, and performance management; hire, onboard, and retain a strong, inclusive team
• Set the technical quality bar: stay close enough to the technical work to weigh in on architecture, review designs, and help the team make sound trade-offs, without becoming the bottleneck

Requirements

Exceptional alignment with GiveDirectly Values and active demonstration of our core competencies: emotional intelligence, problem solving, project management, follow-through, and fostering inclusivity. We welcome and strongly encourage applications from candidates who have personal or professional experience in the low-income and/or historically marginalized communities that we serve.

Language Requirement: English

5+ years managing engineers, including experience leading multiple teams or a larger engineering organization through full delivery cycles

Demonstrated ability to recruit, coach, develop, and retain engineers, building and retaining a talent-dense and inclusive team during periods of high growth

Track record of building a strong engineering culture including candid, ego-free debate, deep product ownership, and continuously raising the bar on craft and tooling (including agentic engineering)

You enable speed through focus and create clarity in ambiguity: cutting through complexity to the strategic kernel and shielding the team from distraction, so a senior team can move fast and autonomously

Strong technical judgment driven by the mission, not ego: you can pressure-test architecture decisions with very senior engineers, have made consequential calls and lived with the results, and weigh technical and non-technical tradeoffs by recipient impact

Energized to build product-development fluency in an organization that's relatively new to it: you've successfully partnered with non-technical stakeholders and leaders, and you’re excited by this, rather than daunted by it

Qualifications

10+ years of overall industry experience building production software, with a strong backend foundation (databases, cloud services, APIs)

Skills

Exceptional alignment with GiveDirectly Values and active demonstration of our core competencies: emotional intelligence, problem solving, project management, follow-through, and fostering inclusivity. We welcome and strongly encourage applications from candidates who have personal or professional experience in the low-income and/or historically marginalized communities that we serve.

Benefits

Not specified

Pay

Not specified

Schedule

Not specified