Director, Engineering

About Nexcess

Nexcess delivers specialty cloud solutions for organizations requiring both high performance and compliance. We serve businesses globally, from agencies scaling client sites to enterprises managing mission-critical operations. Our reputation is built on deep technical expertise and genuine client partnerships. Every environment we manage is supported by a dedicated team committed to excellence.

Overview

As Director, Engineering, you will fully own the product engineering organization, including its architecture, delivery, and engineering roadmap. Your mission is to build and enable an engineering organization that ships fast, reliably, and is efficiently empowered by AI.

How We Work

Business alignment and focus are paramount. Engineering at Nexcess directly contributes to business objectives.

Key Performance Indicators

• Speed: Targeting High/Elite DORA metrics.
• Predictable, reliable delivery of quality software.
• AI adoption and its measurable impact.

Responsibilities

Product and Delivery

• Own the architecture design, delivery, and engineering roadmap for your teams.
• Partner with Product to shape, commit to, and deliver the product vision.
• Manage delivery on monthly cycles with clear cut lines, scoping, designing, and delivering demonstrable value each month.
• Ensure teams have an evidence-backed ability to meet commitments.

Organization and People

• Design high-performing teams with clear boundaries, enabling them to complete work independently.
• Assign one accountable Engineering Manager per team to ensure clear ownership.
• Build the manager bench by hiring, developing, and calibrating engineering managers.
• Maintain a high hiring bar and identify leaders ready to run each team.
• Coach managers to lead effectively rather than focusing on coding.

Qualifications

Required

• 12+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years leading engineering teams and experience leading managers.
• Proven ability to measurably accelerate an engineering organization, demonstrated by instrumenting DORA or equivalent metrics, quantifying before-and-after results, and detailing changes made.
• Real, hands-on experience with AI-assisted engineering at an organizational scale, with quantifiable impact. This includes driving adoption across teams, using agentic tooling weekly, designing your own harness, and understanding its limitations and verification needs. Provide evidence such as your harness, shared skills, agent-executed specs, or review gates shipped.
• Experience redesigning team and work organization, including boundaries, ownership, cadence, and managing the outcomes.
• Track record of delivering and modernizing complex software across multiple teams, including reassessing scope or dates with senior stakeholders and managing consequences.
• Sufficient hands-on technical depth to review designs, understand changes, and maintain a defensible technical position without owning implementation.
• Experience owning an end-to-end hiring plan and maintaining a high bar.
• Proven ability to run software in production with real accountability for availability.
• Experience leading remote teams across time zones, including managing vendor squads under shaped agreements.
• Must have managed a hosting, cloud, or other high-availability service business.

Hard Skills

Depth in a single technology is less critical than judgment in specification, verification, and decision-making, as AI provides syntax and reference. Judgment will be tested in these areas:

• AI-Native Engineering: Daily use of agentic coding tools and a designed harness (repository instructions, shared skills, tool connectors, permission boundaries). Focus on specification-first working, automated review in pull-request paths, defensible positions on auto-approval, and quota/cost governance.
• The Delivery System: DORA instrumentation and improvement, tests on every change with coverage gating, trunk-based delivery and feature flags, observability and service levels, unified tracker with single intake, and incident command with dated action closures.
• Long-Lived Cores: Leading change on twenty-year Perl and PHP monoliths without direct coding. This includes implementing strangler seams behind an API gateway, an identity issuer, an event bus, characterization tests before changes, selecting a system of record when multiple exist, and knowing what not to rewrite.
• Revenue-Bearing Systems: Consolidating billing and payments across processors, including Stripe. Experience with dual-run, reconciliation to Finance, and preparing for rollbacks.
• Hosting Platforms: Expertise with cPanel and InterWorx (our proprietary control panel), WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, and Shopware. Experience with Linux on bare metal and sequencing product delivery around VMware to Nutanix migrations.
• Security in an AI-Assisted SDLC: Managing secrets hygiene and push protection, static analysis in the merge path, tool and connector supply chain security, and prompt injection through repository content.

Disclaimer

This job description summarizes typical functions and is not an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, tasks, or duties. Additional duties may be assigned. Nexcess reserves the right to modify, interpret, or apply this job description to best support organizational needs. This description does not create or imply an employment contract; employment remains “at will.”

Equal Employment Opportunity Policy

Nexcess is committed to offering equal employment opportunity without regard to age, color, disability, gender, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, military status, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.