Director - Engineering

About Responsive

About the Role

As Director of Engineering, you lead the engineering organization’s strategy, execution, and continuous improvement. You are responsible for defining the technical and delivery direction, building high-performing teams, and ensuring software initiatives align with business goals and customer needs. You drive the successful delivery of scalable, reliable, and secure products while establishing strong standards for quality, engineering excellence, operational efficiency, and innovation.

Essential Functions

• Define and execute the engineering strategy, aligning technology investments, product delivery, and team priorities with business goals and customer outcomes.
• Build, lead, and scale high-performing engineering teams across software development, architecture, quality engineering, platform, and technical leadership.
• Drive end-to-end software delivery—from planning and architecture through development, testing, release, and production operations—to ensure predictable, high-quality outcomes.
• Partner with Product, Design, Customer Success, Sales, Security, and Operations to translate business priorities into an actionable engineering roadmap.
• Establish and evolve architecture, technology standards, and engineering practices that enable scalable, secure, reliable, and maintainable products.
• Strengthen engineering excellence through effective quality, security, and operational practices, including code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, release readiness, and incident management.
• Lead resource planning and prioritization across teams and initiatives, balancing product commitments, customer needs, technical debt, reliability, security, and innovation.
• Identify delivery, technical, operational, and organizational risks early; drive mitigation plans, timely escalation, and resolution.
• Champion the practical use of AI, LLMs, automation, and emerging technologies to improve product capabilities, developer productivity, quality, and operational efficiency.
• Own engineering budget planning, headcount strategy, vendor evaluation, cost forecasting, and optimization of cloud and technology investments.
• Define and track meaningful engineering metrics, and communicate delivery health, quality, reliability, productivity, risks, and strategic progress to executive stakeholders.
• Lead talent strategy through hiring, onboarding, performance management, leadership development, and continuous learning, while fostering a culture of ownership, customer empathy, and continuous improvement.

Education

• Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science, IT, or a similar field.
  

Experience

• 16+ years of relevant software industry experience.
• 5+ years of engineering management experience, leading high-performing software engineering teams.
• Proven experience in application architecture, design, development, and production support using Java, React, and MongoDB.
• Strong technical understanding of quality engineering practices, including test automation, quality strategy, CI/CD, and release readiness.
• Experience owning and operating high-scale, highly available, resilient cloud-based systems.
• Hands-on exposure to observability, logging, and customer/product analytics tools such as ELK, Splunk, and Gainsight.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms, particularly AWS and Azure, including cloud architecture, security, reliability, and cost optimization.
• Strong understanding of LLMs, Generative AI, NLP, and the secure, scalable integration of AI capabilities into enterprise software products
  

Knowledge, Ability & Skills

• Software and product management certification would be an added advantage.
• Skilled at presenting and leading discussions with large groups of people.
• Strong problem-solving skills.
• Willingness to roll up one’s sleeves to get the job done.
• Collaborating effectively with cross functional teams.