Director of Engineering

Director of Engineering Please double check you have the right level of experience and qualifications by reading the full overview of this opportunity below. Join Kiddom's search for a hands‑on Director of Engineering to lead key parts of our engineering organization and help bring our AI‑first product vision to life. Reporting to the VP Engineering, this leader will be responsible for managing multiple engineering teams, driving delivery excellence, and evolving our platform to support district‑scale impact. You will translate the company’s technical strategy into execution: building high‑performing teams, maturing our architecture and infrastructure, and partnering closely with Product, Data, AI and Curriculum to ship AI‑powered features that teachers and students love. What You'll Do Own delivery for a portfolio of product and platform areas, ensuring your teams ship high‑quality software on time. Help define and drive adoption of engineering best practices. Contribute to technical decision‑making on architecture, frameworks, and key platform investments. Lead, coach, and grow engineering managers and senior engineers across backend, frontend, DevOps, data, and AI‑adjacent teams. Implement and refine processes for planning, estimation, documentation, and cross‑team collaboration. Partner with the engineering leadership on career ladders, performance management, and succession planning within engineering. Work with Product, Data, and Curriculum teams to deliver AI‑powered features that improve personalization, grading, insights, and curriculum recommendations. Help teams integrate AI capabilities into existing workflows in ways that are intuitive, reliable, and impactful for educators and students. Partner with platform and SRE teams to improve CI/CD pipelines, observability, and cloud cost efficiency. Work with data engineering to design and maintain scalable, well‑modeled data pipelines that power AI and analytics features. Support integration of real‑time and batch data sources into the product in ways that are secure, privacy‑preserving, and aligned with education data regulations. Partner with Product and GTM leaders to prioritize work based on customer impact, state adoption cycles, and business goals. Collaborate with Customer Success and Support to understand field feedback and translate it into backlog items and improvements. Help GTM teams with procurement processes and procedures, including privacy and security guidelines as well as RFO proposals. What We're Looking For 10+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years leading and scaling teams in a SaaS environment. Has managed multiple teams working on a range of products. Strong background in building and operating distributed systems and cloud‑native platforms. Experience delivering products that leverage AI/ML (e.g., recommendations, automation, analytics) or working closely with data science/ML teams. Familiarity with modern data pipelines, security best practices, and observability. Comfortable diving into technical discussions and guiding teams on trade‑offs, even if you are not writing code daily. Be able to be “in the weeds” with the engineers driving technical decisions. Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Kiddom is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, religion, color, gender, sexual orientation, transgender status, national origin, citizenship status, uniform service member status, pregnancy, age, genetic information, disability, or any other protected status in accordance with all applicable federal, state, and local laws. Salary & Benefits Salary range is dependent on geographic location, prior experience, seniority, and demonstrated role related ability during the interview process. Full‑time permanent employees are eligible for the following benefits from their first day of employment: Competitive salary Meaningful equity Health insurance benefits: medical (various PPO/HMO/HSA plans), dental, vision, disability and life insurance One Medical membership (in participating locations) Flexible vacation time policy (subject to internal approval). Average use 4 weeks off per year 10 paid sick days per year (prorated depending on start date) Paid holidays Paid bereavement leave Paid family leave after birth/adoption. xrczosw Minimum of 16 paid weeks for birthing parents, 10 weeks for caretaker parents. Meant to supplement benefits offered by State Commuter and FSA plans