Director of Engineering, Platform & Scale (Remote UK)

Who We Are

At Partnerize, we are dedicated to transforming business growth through our leading partnership automation platform. We empower brands to discover, engage, and convert audiences at scale, specializing in affiliate marketing and influencer collaborations. Our platform helps clients build and manage profitable partnerships that drive real results in the digital marketing landscape. We are a team of passionate problem-solvers committed to client success.

Why Join Us

Join Partnerize for a culture of collaboration, innovation, and respect, guided by our core values. We are committed to creating an environment where everyone can excel. We offer a competitive salary, generous benefits, and a flexible work environment to support both personal and professional growth. If you are ready to advance your career and make an impact, we encourage you to apply.

Job Summary

The Director of Engineering is a pivotal leadership role at Partnerize, combining technical expertise, people management, and product collaboration. Our high-scale platform processes over a billion daily events. You will oversee multiple cross-functional engineering teams through Engineering Managers, focusing on strategies for high throughput, resilience, and observability. This role requires a technical authority who guides architectural decisions and works closely with engineers on complex distributed systems, rather than being purely strategic.

The Things You Care About

Our platform's core function is tracking performance marketing data and developing solutions to convert this data into valuable information for customers. We manage over a billion events daily across our infrastructure, striving to make as much data available in real-time as possible, a significant challenge at this scale. Our platform is driven by REST APIs, with an API-first development approach.

Primary technologies include PHP, Python, JavaScript (React), and Kafka. Data storage utilizes MySQL, PostgreSQL, Druid, and Redis. We continuously evolve our platform and tools to leverage the latest tech advancements, deploying to production multiple times a day.

As a Director of Engineering at Partnerize, you will:

• Lead through Managers: Manage Engineering Managers and Agile Delivery Leads of cross-functional teams, ensuring delivery, quality, and system reliability.
• Act as Technical Authority: Guide architecture across backend and platform systems, actively shaping the design of high-concurrency, event-driven systems.
• Partner with Product: Collaborate closely with Product leaders to define roadmaps, challenge assumptions, and balance development speed with scalability and technical debt.
• Drive Engineering Standards: Develop and maintain processes and best practices for distributed systems and APIs to enable high-quality software delivery at scale.
• Manage Outcomes: Take ownership of technical outcomes and system health, ensuring infrastructure is designed for resilience and observability.
• Nurture Talent: Mentor Engineering Managers and senior engineers, strengthening technical and leadership capabilities across the tribe.
• Foster Culture: Promote a culture of high ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement, aligning engineering efforts with organizational goals.

You are an experienced Engineering Leader with:

• Proven Management Scale: Experience leading multiple engineering teams, including managing other managers, in a fast-paced, product-led environment.
• Deep Technical Roots: Strong background in backend or platform engineering, with demonstrable ability to design and critique distributed systems at scale.
• Architectural Mastery: Experience with event-driven architecture, real-time data processing, and making clear technical decisions under ambiguity.
• Strategic Partnership: A track record of effective collaboration with Product and stakeholders at all levels to balance performance, reliability, and cost.
• Pragmatic Problem Solving: Ability to navigate comfortably between high-level organizational strategy and low-level technical detail.
• Clear Communication: Exceptional interpersonal skills to explain complex trade-offs clearly and define direction independently.

Desired Qualifications & Competencies:

• Scaling Experience: Personally designed systems that scaled and identified their breaking points.
• Conflict Resolution: Challenged engineers or stakeholders effectively, articulating technical or business reasoning.
• Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (preferred).
• Agile & Lean Mastery: Practical experience driving efficiency using Agile principles and modern engineering practices (TDD, CI/CD, DDD).

UK Benefits & Perks

• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays
• Enhanced Parental Leave: 6 months full pay for birth parent, 4 weeks full pay for non-birth parent after one year of employment
• 5 extra 'Partnerize Parental Days' annually
• Private Medical Insurance through Vitality
• Enhanced pension contributions
• Cycle to Work scheme
• Eye Care Vouchers
• Life Assurance
• Enhanced Wellness Program including access to EAP, Wellness Coaching & Wellness Fridays program
• Regular company events and activities

Our Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion

We are committed to attracting, developing, and advancing our outstanding team members, irrespective of race, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, religion, age, gender, gender identity, physical abilities, or any other dimension of diversity. We strive to foster an environment where individuals can be their authentic selves, raise concerns, and innovate without fear. We ensure fair and respectful treatment, equal access to opportunities and resources, and full contribution to the organization's success. Every individual in our business is expected to uphold this commitment without exception.

Privacy and data protection.

Data collected during this application process will be used for recruitment and subsequent employment. Further information is available in the Partnerize privacy policy: https://partnerize.com/privacy-policy/

Notice to Recruiters and Staffing Agencies:

To protect the interests of all parties, Partnerize will not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than directly from a candidate or an approved vendor with a written and signed agreement. Please do not contact or forward resumes to our company employees or locations. Any unsolicited resumes will be considered Partnerize property. Partnerize is not responsible for any charges or fees related to unsolicited resumes.