Director, Engineering

Muck Rack’s Engineering team powers a platform that is meaningfully changing how journalists, PR pros, and marketers around the world work. We’re looking for a visionary and experienced director, engineering to lead our Platform and DevOps functions.

Reporting directly to the VP of engineering, a successful candidate will have oversight of and make significant contributions to the technical vision and strategy for our platform, ensuring its efficiency, stability, and scalability. Through their teams, they are responsible for the design, deployment, and maintenance of our robust infrastructure, our release processes through CI/CD pipelines, and championing automation, resilience, observability, and other best practices. This role will also involve fostering a security-first mindset, managing budgets, and liaising with stakeholders across departments. As a team leader, the director will build, mentor, and guide a high-performing and multi-disciplinary team in a culture of collaboration, continuous learning, and operational excellence. We value leaders who balance strategic thinking with hands-on technical expertise and can effectively communicate with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

What you’ll do:

• Define the technical vision and strategy for the platform and DevOps functions

• Collaborate with CTOs, VP of Engineering, and other technical leaders to align the platform's strategic goals with the company’s objectives

• Build, lead, and mentor a high-performing platform and DevOps team

• Establish clear roles, responsibilities, and performance expectations

• Oversee the design, deployment, and maintenance of scalable and robust infrastructure, while monitoring and optimizing for performance and cost

• Ensure the high availability, performance, and security of the platform

• Automate, automate, automate!

• Develop and enforce best practices in operations, including monitoring, logging, alerting, and incident management

• Work closely with security and production management teams to ensure the platform best practices and compliance standards. Be the voice in the room bringing them in early

• Communicate platform capabilities, limitations, and roadmaps to stakeholders, and be the liaison between stakeholders and your teams

• Negotiate contracts and service-level agreements (SLAs) to ensure optimal value and performance

• Encourage and facilitate continuous learning, certifications, and training sessions

If the details below describe you, you could be a great fit for this role:

• 10+ years of experience in engineering, with a track record of managerial, architectural, and technical contributions successes

• 3+ years of experience managing engineering teams in a start-up / Software-as-a-Service or comparable consumer-facing environment

• We value strong, relevant technical experience leading up to your commitment to the management path. Fluency or high proficiency in some or all our tech stack: Django, Vitess, MySQL, RabbitMQ, AWS is ideal

• Experience in hiring, training, and motivating engineering teams in a remote-first environment

• We do our best work with creative, open-minded problem solvers and strategists

• We appreciate decisiveness, clear communication, and collaboration. You should as well.

Interview Overview

Below you'll find an outline of the interview plan for this role. Please note that this is what we expect the process to look like; we may ask you for supplemental information or require an additional step before making a final decision.

• 30 min interview with a member of our Talent Team

• A 1 hour video interview with the hiring manager

• Peer interviews with the Platform and DevOps team 

• 30 min Q&A with the hiring manager

• Final call(s) with executive team member(s) 

Salary

In the US, the base salary for this role is between $200,000 and $221,000, depending on skills and experience. Total compensation for this role consists of base salary and a quarterly bonus plan. We take a geo-neutral approach to compensation within the US, meaning that we pay based on job function and level, not location. For all other countries, we have competitive pay bands based on market standards.

Individual compensation decisions are based on a number of factors, including experience level, skillset, and balancing internal equity relative to peers at the company. We expect the majority of the candidates who are offered roles at our company to fall healthily throughout the range based on these factors. We recognize that the person we hire may be less experienced (or more senior) than this job description as posted. If that ends up being the case, the updated salary range will be communicated with you as a candidate.