Director of Engineering, Product Foundations

The Role

We are seeking a proven engineering leader to guide and direct our newly formed Product Foundations organization. This is a critical, high-impact role responsible for creating the foundational software and services that our Product and Data Engineering organizations use to build and innovate Cedar’s products.

Your mission will be to accelerate the entire engineering organization by providing reliable, scalable, and easy-to-use systems and platforms. The existing teams that will operate under your leadership include our Payments Foundations, Comms Foundations, App Foundations & DevEx, and ML/AI Foundations teams.

You will co-author and establish the vision for this new org, and advance the next chapter of our strategy for our foundational service offerings, further increasing developer velocity and enabling our product teams to build at scale. This includes partnering with your peers across the engineering and product management orgs to identify and build new foundational offerings, while also leading the strategic effort to extract core services from our product monolith where that makes sense. You will be responsible for leading your teams, in partnership with product management, in creating clear roadmaps that balance immediate customer needs with long-term architectural and operational health. 

What this role is NOT: This is not an infrastructure, DevOps, or IT role. This role does not involve managing data platforms, cloud infra, or network engineering.  If these are where your platform experience lies, this is not the right role for you.

We are looking for a leader with deep experience in:

• Building, operating, and scaling critical backend systems, components, and shared services for internal product engineering customers.
• Developing a compelling vision and roadmap by deeply understanding customer needs while also anticipating future requirements.
• Designing effective systems with clear ownership boundaries, high availability, and robust observability.
• Leading high-performing teams, holding a high bar for technical excellence, efficient delivery, and collaborative culture.

In this position you will:

• Strategy & Vision
• Define and Drive the vision, charter, and long-term strategy for the Product Foundations organization to maximize impact on business goals and developer productivity.
• Architect the Organization: Assess current team structures and shape the organization for maximum alignment, efficiency, and future growth.
• Develop and Champion robust, transparent roadmaps, advocating for the resources required to deliver on them and communicating progress to stakeholders across the company.
• Demonstrate Creativity and Resourcefulness to make the most of your existing resources while avoiding team burnout scenarios.
• People & Team Leadership
• Lead and Mentor a high-performing organization of engineering managers, staff, and principal engineers, fostering a culture of excellence and accountability.
• Build the Future: Actively hire and develop the next generation of technical and people leaders within the organization.
• Technical Execution & Collaboration
• Lead Architectural Evolution: Influence Cedar’s overall technical architecture by establishing clear ownership and API boundaries, including leading the extraction of functionality into standalone services and libraries.
• Partner for Foundational Needs: Collaborate closely with Product Management and Engineering to identify their core needs, creating a strategic path to offload foundational systems they currently maintain.
• Enable AI/ML Innovation: Collaborate with subject matter experts to spearhead the creation of core platforms and systems required to enable the broader adoption of generative AI and ML within Cedar's products.
• Operational Excellence
• Foster a Culture of Reliability: Ensure incidents are managed swiftly and lead to durable improvements. Drive the evolution of foundational systems for higher stability, observability, and performance.
• Instill Engineering Discipline: Establish and maintain a culture of metrics-driven decision-making, with robust monitoring, alerting, and quality standards.

What we look for in an ideal candidate:

• Must Haves:
• 10+ years of experience in software development, with at least 3 of those years leading/on teams building core product systems for internal customers.
• 5+ years of total experience in a leadership role, directly managing engineering teams.
• 2+ years of total experience managing managers.
• Experience leading organizations of 30+ people.
• Experience utilizing build and release platforms and testing frameworks.
• Proven track record of successful project delivery and customer satisfaction, including technical change management.
• Your default reaction to seeing a problem is to take initiative and own finding a solution.
• Excellent cross-functional stakeholder management experience to navigate trade-off discussions and negotiate priorities.
• Extremely strong, proactive, and transparent communication style, both verbal and written.
• Strong process orientation around getting things done at scale - you are comfortable with project management methodologies but believe Process Pays Rent and can adapt the right agile delivery model for the team.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment with competing priorities.
• You demonstrate confidence in making decisions, sharing strong opinions, but remaining open to new perspectives.
• You are passionate about creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment where collaboration is a fundamental part of how you work.
• Nice to Haves:
• Experience leading developer experience efforts including build and release platforms and testing frameworks.
• Experience working on projects that leverage ML and/or AI.
• Previous healthcare experience.

Compensation Range and Benefits

• Salary/Hourly Rate Range*: $255,000-300,000
• This role is equity eligible
• This role offers a competitive benefits and wellness package

*Subject to location, experience, and education

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