Director of Engineering

The Director of Engineering leads Engine's data management team, the group that loads and transforms retailer data powering Engine's SaaS Retail Analytics product. This is a people leadership role first: you'll grow a team of data engineers through mentoring and career conversations, run the team's delivery process, and partner with Customer Success, Product, and other engineering leaders.

• Lead and develop a team of data engineers: run 1:1s that develop people, hold career development conversations, give direct feedback, and grow the team's technical capability through regular knowledge-sharing sessions
• Own team health and direction: hold regular check-ins, address concerns before they escalate, and communicate strategy and product vision so the team understands where the work is headed and why it matters
• Run the team's delivery process end to end: own story readiness so no un-pointed or unrefined work enters a sprint, and the backlog meets the definition-of-ready ahead of each planning session
• Communicate proactively with Customer Success: for any feature spanning multiple sprints, share scope, a sprint-by-sprint breakdown, and delivery timeline up front, and re-communicate when scope or timing changes
• Set support issue timelines with initial acknowledgment and expected resolution, and provide proactive updates if a timeline slips, so Customer Success never has to chase engineering for status
• Monitor quality signals (defects, delivery slippage, support volume tied to recent releases) and surface issues before customers or Customer Success do
• Maintain operational visibility into the team's data connector footprint: which are automated versus manually maintained, which platform each runs on, and how many customers depend on each
• Partner with other engineering, product, and data leaders to resolve roadmap conflicts and reduce single-person dependencies on critical systems

• 5+ years leading a data engineering, data management, or technical team, with direct people-management responsibility: hiring, coaching, performance management, career development
• Demonstrated track record of mentoring engineers and having real career and performance conversations, including how you've diagnosed and resolved a low performer situation
• Demonstrated experience running agile delivery for an engineering team: sprint planning, backlog grooming, retrospectives, definition-of-ready
• Track record of proactive stakeholder communication, particularly with Customer Success or client-facing teams, on delivery timelines and incident status
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence at all levels
• Working technical understanding of modern data engineering (data pipelines, cloud data platforms) sufficient to guide the team's decisions, even without hands-on daily coding
• Ability to work on-site in Rogers, AR

• Hands-on experience with Databricks, Apache Spark, Python, or C# in a production data pipeline environment
• Experience owning data ingestion and transformation pipelines for a SaaS or retail analytics product, ideally involving retailer or point-of-sale data
• Experience with CPG or retail syndicated data (Scintilla, other POS, IRI, SPINS, Circana)
• Familiarity with medallion (bronze/silver/gold) lakehouse architecture