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Remote Director of Engineering jobs

11 open positions in the United States, newest first.

Leads several engineering teams through the managers who run them and is accountable for what those teams deliver and how reliably it runs. A director of engineering sets technical direction with senior engineers, plans headcount and budget, hires and develops managers, and negotiates priorities with product leadership. The role is about organization and delivery more than writing code.

About the Director of Engineering role

What the work looks like

  • Holds one-on-ones with engineering managers and staff engineers and coaches them on people and delivery problems.
  • Plans quarterly roadmaps with product and design leaders and decides how teams are staffed against them.
  • Reviews architecture proposals and incident postmortems and decides where to invest in reliability or technical debt.
  • Owns hiring plans, interview loops, promotions, and performance calibration for the organization.
  • Reports delivery status, risks, and staffing needs to the vice president of engineering or chief technology officer.

What employers ask for

  • Experience managing engineering managers
  • Strong software architecture background
  • Roadmap and headcount planning
  • Hiring and performance management
  • Incident and reliability practices
  • Communication with executives and product leaders

Doing this job remotely

Directors of distributed organizations manage through written plans, metrics, and scheduled conversations, with little chance to pick up problems informally. Calendars are meeting-heavy and stretch across the time zones the teams occupy. Periodic travel for leadership offsites and team gatherings is typical, as is being an escalation point for major incidents.

Where it comes from and where it leads

Directors are promoted from engineering manager or senior manager, having earlier been senior engineers themselves. The next levels are senior director, vice president of engineering, and in smaller companies chief technology officer.