Director of Engineering

Who You Are

You are an engineer who never stopped loving the craft. You lean in when it gets hard. You teach what you know and learn from the people around you. You lift a team by building alongside it, not by watching from above. You are the person a leader can hand a hard problem to and trust what comes back. You also bring the structure and follow-through that turn a fast-moving team into one that runs on its own. You want the people around you to grow and you enjoy the work of getting them there.

About Leap

Leap builds the software home improvement contractors run their business on. Our products are Leap CRM, SalesPro for sales and estimating, Leap Pay and financing, and Leap Crew, our new AI product. Contractors run real sales and real money through these products every day. Leap Pay and financing connect them to more than a dozen home improvement lenders. Leap Crew is live with paying customers and ships to production every day.

Why This Role

• Shape a department, don’t inherit one. We run on small teams and fast decisions. The standards, habits, and leaders you build will define how Leap engineering works for years.
• Run what customers depend on and build what comes next. You lead the products contractors use every day and Leap Crew at the same time.
• A real partnership. You work side by side with the VP of Engineering. You help shape the direction and own how the department runs day to day.

About the Role

Engineering at Leap has one job: deliver stable features to our customers, fast. You run that day to day across about 35 engineers on seven teams, most of them through offshore partner teams. You are the VP of Engineering's number two. You own delivery, production, and how the department runs. The VP owns direction, architecture, the technical bets, and the budget. You bring what you have seen work at scale to that direction, and you push back when something is wrong. When you disagree, the VP makes the final call.

What You Will Own

• Delivery. Engineering commits to a roadmap with Product and FinTech and delivers it. You agree with Product how delivery is measured, report it every week, and own moving it.
• People. You lead the team leads and the engineers who report to you. You set clear expectations, coach first, and act when the bar still is not met.
• Ownership all the way through. You push decisions down to the leads and help every engineer take their work from spec to customers, on any product. Nothing waits on one person, including you.
• Production. Releases, alerting, on-call, and incident review, with targets for uptime, time to recovery, time to production, and release quality set per product. Every significant incident gets a written review.
• Delivery review and spec review. You run both. 
• Partner teams. You work with partner leadership on priorities, quality, and how their engineers grow inside our teams. 
• Hiring and onboarding. You run the loop and make the call through senior. Staff and lead hires we decide together. You bring new engineers up to the bar.
• One way of building. Every team works on the same practices, tools, and infrastructure. We keep process that fits our size and drop what only slows people down.
• Player-coach. You write code every week, a significant part of your time, building with AI agents alongside the engineers. You take real work, but never anything the team waits on, so nothing stalls when you are pulled into leading.

What We Are Looking For

Must-haves

• 7+ years managing engineers, including managing managers or team leads
• You have run an engineering organization of 15 or more engineers, including offshore partner teams
• You have owned delivery for a product company. Tell us what was committed, what shipped, and what you changed when the two did not match
• You have owned production: releases, alerting, on-call, and incident review
• You think in systems. You design the cadences, measures, and reviews that make commitments hold, and you remove process that stops earning its place
• Player-coach. You stay hands-on. You read the specs and pull requests that matter, pair with engineers, and ship something most weeks with AI coding agents, about a day of your time. Never anything the team waits on, so nothing stalls when you are pulled into leading
• You are an engineer by trade, and you still ship code. You read pull requests and specs, you can tell a sound design from a risky one, and engineers trust your judgment
• You use AI coding agents in your own work and treat them as a tool. You measure what they do well and badly, and you change how you use them. You have brought a team along, or you are doing it now. We will ask you to walk us through it
• You lead without ego, say the hard thing early, and make the people around you better, your boss included
• Authorized to work in the US and able to keep Eastern time zone hours

Nice-to-haves

• Vertical SaaS, home services, or contractor-facing software
• Payments or lending, and security programs such as SOC 2 and PCI DSS
• Running old and new systems side by side and retiring the old one without breaking the business
• Trunk-based development, feature flags, and our stack: TypeScript, Node, React, PostgreSQL, and AWS
• A growth-stage, investor-backed company where you reported engineering results to the executive team and board

How We Work

No ego. We look for people who make everyone around them better: they teach what they know, learn what they do not, and stay humble about both. We focus on what we can control, fix problems together, and do not point fingers.

Extreme ownership. Everyone owns the outcome, not just their ticket. If you see a problem, it is yours until it is fixed or clearly handed off. If you are blocked, that is the top priority, and staying quiet about it is on you.

We get better together. We do not build the same thing twice. Practices, tooling, and infrastructure improve for every team at once, and we challenge each other’s work because we share the bar.

AI is a tool, and we use it well. Our engineers build with AI coding agents every day. Like any tool, it is only as good as how you use it. We watch how it performs for us, measure it, and keep changing how we use it. People own the spec, the review, and the bar.

Done means done. Once a week, the leads walk through what reached customers, what did not, and why. Merged is not done, and live is not done. Done means every customer has it and it has held up in production.

Pay Range 200000 - 225000 USD