Director of Software Engineering (AI & Delivery)

Job Type

Full-time

Description

Location: Hybrid – 3 days onsite per week at our Irvine, California office

About The Role

We’re looking for a Director of Engineering to lead software delivery for customer pilots and early production deployments while building durable engineering practices that scale. You will own execution across planning, architecture reviews, risk management, and delivery quality while working closely with Product and GTM stakeholders. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who thrives in fast-paced startups and understands how GenAI is reshaping the way modern teams build and ship software.

Requirements

What You’ll Do:

Delivery Ownership & Execution

• Own end-to-end delivery for customer pilots and early production rollouts: milestones, dependencies, scope control, and customer acceptance.
• Translate business/customer commitments into clear execution plans (phased delivery, success criteria, release gates).
• Drive delivery cadence (sprint planning, demos, retros, execution reviews) and ensure predictable outcomes without slowing the team down.
• Establish and continuously improve delivery governance: definition of done, quality gates, incident readiness, and release processes.
  
  

Technical Leadership (LLMs, Agents, and Systems)

• Provide technical direction on products leveraging LLMs and emerging “agentic” patterns (tool use, planning, orchestration, memory, evaluation).
• Guide architecture and design reviews, ensuring reliability, scalability, security, and maintainability.
• Make pragmatic tradeoffs between speed and robustness; avoid one-off implementations by pushing for reusable platform capabilities where appropriate.
• Establish best practices for LLM application development: prompt/versioning, eval harnesses, model selection, safety/guardrails, and observability.
  
  

SDLC Excellence in the GenAI Era

• Build modern SDLC practices that reflect how GenAI changes engineering workflows:
• Faster iteration cycles with stronger automated checks (CI/CD, test generation, static analysis, regression suites).
• AI-assisted development practices with clear standards for review, correctness, security, and maintainability.
• Ensure high engineering quality through disciplined practices: code review culture, testing strategy, design docs, and operational readiness.
• Drive effective incident response and postmortems; ensure learnings loop back into engineering systems and processes.
  

Team Leadership & Talent Development

• Lead, coach, and grow engineering managers and senior ICs; set clear expectations and career development paths.
• Foster a high-trust, high-ownership environment with strong accountability and healthy pace.
• Build hiring plans aligned to roadmap priorities; attract and retain strong engineers in a competitive market.
• Ensure sustainable execution by managing workload, prioritization, and resource allocation across concurrent initiatives.
  
  

Cross-Functional & Customer Alignment

• Partner tightly with Product, Customer Solutions, Design, and GTM to align roadmap, delivery, and customer expectations.
• Communicate status, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to executives and stakeholders; proactively surface issues with solution options.
• Support customer escalations when needed and ensure strong technical credibility in customer-facing settings.
  
  

What We’re Looking For

Must-Haves

• 8 years of professional software engineering experience, including 3 years leading teams as an engineering manager or director (or equivalent scope).
• Proven track record delivering complex software projects end-to-end in fast-paced environments (startup experience strongly preferred).
• Strong SDLC fundamentals: planning, estimation, dependency management, CI/CD, testing strategy, release management, and operational excellence.
• Experience building or deploying AI/LLM-enabled products (or platforms), with familiarity across:
• LLM application architecture
• Evaluation methodologies (offline evals, golden sets, human review)
• Reliability/latency/cost tradeoffs
• Guardrails and safety considerations (prompt injection, data leakage, tool safety)
• Strong people leadership: coaching, performance management, hiring, and team culture.
  

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with agentic systems (tool calling, orchestration, multi-step planning, workflow engines, retrieval/RAG).
• Experience building developer platforms, internal tooling, or reusable frameworks that scale delivery across multiple customers.
• Background in enterprise deployments: security reviews, compliance, SSO, data boundaries, and customer integration patterns.
• Familiarity with observability stacks and LLM observability (traces, prompts, evaluation metrics, cost/latency monitoring).
  
  

Compensation

The annual base salary range is 300,000 - 350,000 USD. Your base salary will be determined based on your experience, knowledge, and skills. You will also be eligible for benefits.