Director, Software Engineering

The Role You'll Play

As Director of Software Engineering, you'll lead several engineering squads and manage a team of engineering managers responsible for high-impact product and platform initiatives. This is a pivotal role requiring strategic vision, operational excellence, and the ability to scale engineering organizations during a critical growth phase. You'll balance the execution of near-term product initiatives with the architectural decisions that support long-term platform vision. You’ll also help shape how AI advances both our consumer experience and the way our engineering organization operates by identifying high-value opportunities, guiding responsible adoption, and enabling teams to experiment and build with emerging technologies effectively.

You'll partner closely with our VP of Engineering, product leadership, and cross functional stakeholders to unblock teams and drive measurable impact. Your engineering managers will oversee strong individual contributor teams, so you'll focus on providing strategic direction, coaching your manager-level reports, removing organizational friction, and ensuring your leadership creates an environment where your best engineers do their best work.

You’ll Spend Time working on:

Setting vision and strategy for the consumer engineering organization, including roadmap prioritization, technical architecture decisions, and resource allocation across four engineering teams

Building and developing engineering leaders

Leading transformative initiatives including a brand-new product launch while also iterating on established platforms

Enabling rapid experimentation in growth and community, balancing velocity with code quality and scalability

Managing upward effectively with your VP of Engineering and broader leadership team, surfacing risks and opportunities while advocating for your teams' needs

Owning cross-team collaboration across consumer surfaces (web, iOS, Android) and backend systems, driving alignment on shared technical decisions

Championing engineering excellence through hiring, onboarding, technical standards, and operational best practices across your four teams

Driving organizational health, including talent development, manager feedback and support, and culture initiatives that keep your teams engaged and growing

Representing consumer engineering within the broader Playlist/ClassPass engineering organization and contributing to org-wide initiatives

About the right team member:

You're a mature engineering leader with a track record of scaling engineering organizations within fast-moving consumer companies. You bring strong technical judgment, the ability to manage organizational complexity, and an empathetic approach to developing both engineers and engineering managers. You thrive on building high-trust teams, are comfortable with ambiguity, and can translate business strategy into technical execution.

You're someone who has managed significant teams and scope but hasn't lost the ability to dive deep into technical conversations. You value ownership and accountability from your teams, and you're skilled at creating clarity in complex situations. You enjoy the interplay between product and engineering, and you're excited to help build consumer platforms that delight millions of users.

You’ll thrive in this role with experience in:

3+ years leading as a Director or Sr. Engineering Manager with demonstrated success building and scaling engineering organizations managing multiple teams and leaders (not just direct IC management)

Significant consumer-facing product experience, ideally with exposure to both web and mobile platforms

Building and shipping complex products at scale, with a track record of taking initiatives from concept to launch and optimizing them for impact

Hands-on technical depth in backend systems, APIs, mobile development (iOS/Android), or full-stac architectures

Shaping and scaling AI-enabled ways of working, including identifying high-leverage opportunities, piloting new workflows, measuring their impact, and driving adoption

Experience leading teams across time zones and fostering a remote-first, asynchronous-friendly culture

Experience with some amount of organizational ownership beyond pure IC/manager coaching including headcount planning, hiring, cross-team dependency management, technical architecture decisions

A growth mindset and comfort with ambiguity

Strong communication skills with the ability to connect technical and business perspectives, translate between layers of the organization, and drive alignment across functions

Technologies You'll Be Working With

We value adaptability and problem-solving over specific tools, but here's what you'll likely encounter:

Backend: Kotlin/Java, AWS (ECS, SQS, RDS), microservices

Mobile: Swift/SwiftUI, Android/Jetpack Compose, modern reactive architectures

Consumer platforms: Web and mobile frontend frameworks, real-time sync, personalization engines

Data & Analytics: Event tracking, Snowflake data warehouse, experimentation platforms

It is Playlist’s intent to pay all Team Members competitive wages and salaries that are motivational, fair and equitable. The goal of Playlist’s compensation program is to be transparent, attract potential employees, meet the needs of all current employees, and encourage Team Members to stay with our organization. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, depth of experience, certifications, and specific work location.

The base salary range for this position in the United States is $216,000 to $$288,000. The total compensation package for this position may also include a performance bonus, benefits and/or other applicable incentive compensation plans