Director, Software Engineering - Partner Platform

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 and reliability.

You'll also help shape how AI advances both our product 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 supply engineering organization, including roadmap prioritization, technical architecture decisions, and resource allocation across four engineering teams

Building and developing engineering leaders

Owning the reliability and scalability of the systems at the center of the marketplace — inventory accuracy, reservation throughput, and the integrity of our integrations with external partner platforms

Balancing velocity with code quality, operational maturity, and long-term maintainability

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 backend services, APIs, and adjacent engineering organizations, 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 your organization 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 in fast-moving 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 — about distributed systems design, API contracts, data integrity, and operational reliability. 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 platforms that operate at scale.

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 experience owning backend and platform systems at scale — distributed services, high-throughput transactional flows, and the operational rigor they demand

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

Hands-on technical depth in backend systems and API design; familiarity with JVM ecosystems (Kotlin/Java) is a plus

Marketplace, two-sided platform, or B2B/SMB-facing product experience is a plus

Leading teams through reliability and platform-maturity work — incident response, observability, and reducing operational load

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

Organizational ownership beyond pure IC/manager coaching, including headcount planning, hiring, cross-team dependency management, and 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

APIs & Integrations: Public and partner-facing APIs, service-to-service architectures

Web: Modern JavaScript/React frontends

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