Director, Engineering

About Nexcess

Nexcess provides specialty cloud solutions for organizations where performance and compliance have to coexist. We serve businesses worldwide, from agencies scaling client sites to enterprises running mission-critical operations. We've built our reputation on deep technical expertise and genuine partnership with every client we work with. Behind every environment we manage is a team of people who take the craft seriously and keep showing up when it matters.

You will run and own the product engineering organization end to end: their architecture, delivery, and engineering roadmap. You are here to build and enable an engineering organization that ships fast and reliably, and how much of it is AI-efficiently enabled.

Business alignment and focus come first. Engineering here exists to move the business.

• Speed: DORA metrics with High/Elite as the target.
• Predictable, reliable delivery of quality software.
• AI adoption and its impact.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture design, delivery and engineering roadmap for your teams. Build the partnership with Product: shape it together, commit to it, and then deliver it.
• Run delivery on monthly cycles with an explicit cut line. Scope, design and deliver demonstrable value each month. Your teams must have an evidence backed ability to meet commitments rather than explained afterwards. 

• Design teams that deliver. Draw team boundaries so a team can finish its work without waiting on any other team. One accountable Engineering Manager per team, so the owner of any piece of work is known the moment it arrives.
• Build the manager bench. Hire, develop, and calibrate engineering managers, own the hiring bar, and know who is ready to run each team. Coach them to lead rather than code.

• 12+ years in software engineering, including 5+ leading engineering teams, and experience leading managers.
• Evidence you have made an engineering organization measurably faster. You instrumented DORA or an equivalent, you know your before-and-after numbers, and can walk through what you changed and what broke while it settled.
• Real, hands-on AI-assisted engineering at organizational scale, with impact you can quantify. Not a pilot and not a vendor rollout: adoption driven across teams, agentic tooling you use yourself every week, your own harness you can describe, and a clear view of where it fails and what to verify. Bring the evidence: the harness you run, a skill you wrote and shared, a spec an agent executed, the review gates you shipped.
• Experience redesigning how teams and work are organized: boundaries, ownership, cadence, and living with the result.
• Delivered and modernized complex software through multiple teams, including reassessing scope or dates with senior stakeholders and absorbing the consequences.
• Hands-on enough to review a design, read a change and hold a defensible technical position without owning the implementation.
• Owned a hiring plan end to end and held a bar; run software in production with real accountability for availability; led remote teams across time zones with vendor squads inside them, on agreements you shaped.
• Managed hosting, cloud or another high-availability service business is a must.

Depth in any single technology matters less than the judgment to specify, verify and decide; AI supplies the syntax and the reference. These are the areas we will test that judgment in.

• AI-native engineering. Agentic coding tools as your daily instrument and a harness you designed: repository instructions, shared skills, tool connectors, permission boundaries. Specification-first working, automated review in the pull-request path, a defensible position on what may be auto-approved, and quota and cost governance.
• The delivery system. DORA instrumented and moved, tests on every change with coverage gating, trunk-based delivery and feature flags, observability and service levels, one tracker with one intake door, incident command with actions closed on dates.
• Long-lived cores. Leading change on twenty-year Perl and PHP monoliths without writing either: strangler seams behind an API gateway, an identity issuer and an event bus, characterization tests before change, a system of record chosen where there are two of everything, and knowing what not to rewrite.
• Revenue-bearing systems. Billing and payments consolidation across processors, Stripe among them: dual-run, reconciliation to Finance, and a rollback you prepared.
• Hosting platforms. cPanel and InterWorx, the control panel we develop ourselves; WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento and Shopware above them; Linux on bare metal, and a VMware to Nutanix migration that product delivery has to sequence around.
• Security in an AI-assisted SDLC. Secrets hygiene and push protection, static analysis in the merge path, the tool and connector supply chain, prompt injection through repository content.

This job description is only a summary of the typical functions of the position. It is not intended to be an exhaustive or comprehensive list of all job responsibilities, tasks, or duties. Additional duties and tasks may be assigned as part of the job function. Nexcess reserves the right to modify, interpret, or apply this job description in a way that best supports the organizational needs. The job description in no way creates or implies an employment contract. The employment contract remains “at will”.

Nexcess is committed to offering equal employment opportunity without regard to age, color, disability, gender, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, military status, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.
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