Director of Engineering - Data Platform

The team + the role

Pendo's Data Platform is the backbone of everything we do. Our systems process more than 50 billion events per day, peaking at over 1 million events per second, and manage dozens of petabytes of data across several production environments. The platform powers real-time data ingestion, batch processing, and analytics at scale — and the instrumentation standards that keep our entire codebase observable. It's built primarily in Go, runs on Google Kubernetes Engine, and relies on Cloud Pub/Sub, Firestore, Google Cloud Storage, Redis, and memcache. We expect the stack to evolve, and you'll help decide how.

We're looking for a Director of Engineering to lead the teams that own this infrastructure. This is a leadership role with real technical depth — you'll set strategy, build and grow high-performing engineering teams, and partner closely with Site Reliability Engineering. You'll stay close enough to the code to review designs, debug production issues, and contribute when it matters. You'll also own the economics of running the platform at this scale and be a trusted voice with customers on performance, data integrity, and reliability. If you want a role where architectural decisions have immediate business consequence and the technical bar is genuinely high, this is it.

This role is based in Raleigh, NC and follows Pendo's hybrid model: in-office 3 days per week.

What this looks like day-to-day

• Lead multiple engineering teams responsible for our real-time data ingestion pipeline, analytics batch job pipelines, and analytics query engine — setting technical direction and roadmap while balancing near-term delivery with long-term scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Drive architectural decisions across storage, compute, and data modeling; know when to adopt, build, or retire technologies and make those calls with conviction and clear rationale.
• Own instrumentation standards across the core codebase — structured logging, OpenTelemetry metrics and tracing — ensuring teams across the organization can adopt them with minimal friction and that the resulting telemetry is useful, consistent, and cost-conscious.
• Own the cost profile of the data platform at petabyte scale: forecast infrastructure spend for new product initiatives, improve cost attribution by customer, product, feature, and team, and diagnose and resolve cost overruns quickly.
• Partner with SRE on shared on-call responsibilities, incident response, postmortems, and reliability roadmaps; define and track SLOs for ingestion latency, query performance, and data correctness.
• Serve as a technical authority in customer conversations on platform performance, data integrity, and reliability — translating customer needs and escalations into clear engineering priorities.
• Hire, coach, and develop engineering managers and senior engineers; build a team culture grounded in high standards, clear communication, and continuous improvement.

Who you are

Beyond the qualifications, we hire through a specific lens. These aren't buzzwords; they're the things we'll actually look for in how you talk about your work.

You're a builder, not a maintainer.

You're most energized when there isn't a clear path yet, and you get to define it. You don't wait for direction; you identify gaps, shape solutions, and drive them forward. At Pendo, great engineering directors don't just manage delivery — they operate as technical owners, setting architectural direction, making cost and reliability tradeoffs visible before they become crises, and building teams that can operate at the same level of ambition.

You're AI-curious — genuinely.

You're not using AI tools occasionally. You're rewiring how you work around them — and you bring that same orientation to your teams. You evaluate emerging tools with sound judgment, separate meaningful shifts from hype, and guide the adoption of AI-assisted and agentic coding practices across the organization in a way that raises the bar rather than creates new risk.

Must-haves

• Several years of engineering management experience, including managing managers or multiple teams; a track record of building high-performing teams in a high-growth SaaS environment.
• Demonstrated experience building and operating large-scale, data-intensive distributed systems in production — ideally at a scale comparable to 50B+ events per day and petabyte-level data management.
• Strong experience across real-time data ingestion, batch processing, and analytics or query systems.
• Demonstrated cost and financial acumen at infrastructure scale: forecasting, optimization, attribution, and overrun diagnosis; ability to build a credible cost model and communicate its assumptions to both technical and financial stakeholders.
• Deep experience with diverse database technologies — relational (SQL), document (NoSQL), columnar, and vector; hands-on experience with Firestore or similar is a strong plus.
• Hands-on experience with multiple cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, Azure), including object storage and managed data services; deep GCP experience is especially valuable.
• Experience with message queuing and streaming systems (Pub/Sub, Kafka, SQS, or similar), caching technologies (Redis, Valkey, memcache), and containerized workloads on Kubernetes at scale.
• Working knowledge of observability practices and tooling, ideally including OpenTelemetry; comfort reading, reviewing, and contributing to Go code.
• Ability to communicate credibly with customers, executives, and engineers on complex topics — performance tradeoffs, consistency guarantees, reliability commitments — and the sound judgment to make pragmatic, well-reasoned decisions in ambiguous situations.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with high-cardinality, high-volume event or telemetry data.
• Background in multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
• Familiarity with FinOps practices and cloud billing data, including cost allocation approaches such as tagging, labeling, and usage-based attribution.
• Contributions to open-source projects in the data or observability ecosystem.

About Pendo

Pendo was founded in 2013 by former product managers, who combined their heads and hearts to build something they wanted but never had as product managers: a simple way to understand and attack what truly drives product success. Our mission is to improve society's experience with software. Come join one of the fastest-growing startups, supported by best-in-class institutions like Battery Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Spark Capital and Meritech.

Pendo core values: Bias to Act, Hone Your Craft, The Team is Pendo, and Maniacal Focus.

Location: Pendo is a hybrid culture. In our Raleigh office 3 days per week.

Benefits: Highly competitive, employer-heavy coverage (including $0 premium options), strong 401(k) match, equity, and flexible time off.

Compensation: Our salary ranges are based on paying competitively for our size and industry, and are one part of many compensation, benefits and other reward opportunities we provide.

The expected salary range for this role to be performed in North Carolina is USD $235,000 – USD $280,000.

EEOC: We are an equal opportunity employer and believe having diverse teams where everyone brings their whole self to Pendo is key to our success. We welcome all people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives.

Accessibility: Pendo is committed to working with, and providing access and reasonable accommodation to, applicants with mental and/or physical disabilities. If you think you may require an accommodation for any part of the recruitment process, please send a request to: [email protected]. All requests for accommodations are treated discreetly and confidentially, as practical and permitted by law.