Director of Software Engineering
The Role
Spire is making a fundamental shift in how it operates its constellation. The new model is based on SRE principles applied to a constellation, autonomous fault handling, AI-driven anomaly detection, low toil, high data quality, and continuous improvement baked into the system. This Director will lead that transformation.
What This Role Is Not
This is not a role for someone who wants to graduate out of technical work. If your ideal week is back-to-back 1:1s, sprint ceremonies, and stakeholder syncs, this is not the right fit. We need a director who writes code, reviews architecture, challenges technical decisions, and earns the team's respect through demonstrated craft and not just tenure or title.
What You Will Work On
Technical Leadership: Define and own the technical roadmap for autonomous constellation operations, set the architectural direction for the data platform, reliability systems, and automation infrastructure, stay hands-on, review code, prototype solutions, and get into the details when it matters, establish engineering standards across code quality, system design, testing, and observability, and hold the team to them.
Team Building & Culture: Recruit, develop, and retain a team of 6 to 10 world-class reliability and platform engineers, set the pace, tone, and ambition for the team and make being on it feel like a privilege, create an environment where engineers grow fast, own their work, and ship things they are proud of, identify gaps and level up engineers through mentorship and not just management.
Operational Transformation: Lead the shift from manual, operator-driven processes to fully automated and self-healing operations, define and drive toward SLOs, error budgets, and reliability targets for the constellation, partner with satellite operations and mission teams to translate pain into software solutions.
Cross-Functional Influence: Be the technical voice of the team in company-wide conversations about architecture, infrastructure, and platform strategy, influence how Spire thinks about automation, data, and AI/ML across the broader engineering organization.
Basic Qualifications
7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 in a technical leadership or staff-level individual contributor role
Demonstrated track record building and shipping reliable production systems at scale. You have owned things that could not go down.
Strong foundation in Python, distributed systems, data platforms, and cloud infrastructure
Experience with SRE principles, reliability engineering, or large-scale automation. You have reduced toil systematically and not just complained about it.
Experience hiring and developing engineers. You know what great looks like and how to find it.
The communication and influence skills to drive technical decisions across teams you do not directly control
Preferred Qualifications
Experience applying AI/ML or advanced analytics to operational or monitoring problems
Experience writing performance software in Rust
Background in space systems, aerospace, or highly constrained real-time environments
Experience building data lakes, telemetry platforms, or observability infrastructure at scale
A history of leading teams through technical transformations and not just maintaining the status quo
Spire Global
Spire Global is a space-to-cloud analytics company that owns and operates the largest multi-purpose constellation of satellites. Its proprietary data and algorithms provide the most advanced maritime, aviation, and weather tracking in the world. In addition to its constellation, Spire’s data infrastructure includes a global ground station network and 24/7 operations that provide real-time global coverage of every point on Earth. Spire is Global and our success draws upon the diverse viewpoints, skills and experiences of our employees. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity or veteran status.
About Spire
We improve life on Earth with data from space. Spire Global is a space-to-cloud analytics company that owns and operates the largest multi-purpose constellation of satellites. Its proprietary data and algorithms provide the most advanced maritime, aviation, and weather tracking in the world. In addition to its constellation, Spire’s data infrastructure includes a global ground station network and 24/7 operations that provide real-time global coverage of every point on Earth. Spire is Global and our success draws upon the diverse viewpoints, skills and experiences of our employees. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity or veteran status.