Director, Engineering

At Livefront, we help companies design and build world-class digital products that command attention and inspire joy. We’ve helped household names like Target, Samsung, General Mills, and Optum create experiences that have reached millions of people, and startups like HomeSpotter and Acclaim build entirely new businesses that challenge their industries’ status quo.

We’re looking for an outstanding Director, Engineering to join our team. 

Who you are

You're an expert in your field and care deeply about software craft. You lead by example, have exceptionally high standards, and have a long record of inspiring teams to do their best work. You manage competing priorities gracefully and can rally a team to execute with great results. You understand the motivations, strengths, and weaknesses of your team and cultivate an environment of learning, growth, and career development for everyone. You're a teacher and mentor, and you go out of your way to support and serve your team. You lead major engineering decisions and initiatives, inspire collaboration and support, and drive initiatives to completion with the team. You stay informed about industry trends, participate in community and industry events, and share knowledge via regular publications and presentations. You are empathetic, curious, and always learning and improving. You are not limited by software engineering dogma, and your engineering principles are mature, fluid, and influenced by your experience, your peers, and advances in the field.  

What you will be doing

As a Director of Engineering, you will lead the engineering practice at Livefront. This is a billable role where you will employ a “lead by example” style of leadership. In addition to client work, you will mentor, support, and manage the engineers reporting directly to you. You will work with our client partners and the Livefront team to create and refine the overall technical vision for our engagements. You will participate in technical discovery, advocate for Livefront's engineering philosophy and approach, choose the right technologies to solve the problem, and see projects through to completion. You will collaborate with Livefront leadership to push everything we do forward across our three pillars, noted below.

Excellence in Delivery & Communication

- Work with the engineering team to continually refine our architectures and engineering standards and facilitate the adoption of those ideas across the team and our client projects.

- Define our standards for software development, code reviews, testing, security, and performance monitoring, and ensure conformance with those standards across all our projects.

- Plan, estimate, and execute engineering initiatives for the organization and our client projects.

- Ensure the security of all engineering source code, systems, and data.

- Roll up your sleeves and work directly in the codebase from time-to-time.

- Create architecture diagrams, sequence diagrams, and other technical illustrations to enable effective communication regarding technical requirements.

One-of-a-Kind Team

- Provide technical leadership, guidance, and mentorship for engineers on the team.

- Conduct employee performance reviews and support and cultivate professional growth for the engineers directly reporting to you.

- Foster a culture of learning, ownership, accountability, and transparency for the engineering team.

- Actively participate in the recruiting process by interviewing candidates in one-on-one or group settings and evaluating candidates’ technical abilities via interviews or code review.

Thought Leadership and Community

- Contributing to the broader engineering community through writing, public speaking, and open source.

- Committing to at least two articles or speeches at public events each year.

- Mentoring other engineers regarding community contributions.

- Participating with high visibility in community events.

• You want to work with passionate and talented people who are always looking for ways to make things better. 
• You desire a work environment where respect, mutual trust, and egoless collaboration are paramount. 
• You want colleagues who take their work seriously but not themselves, and who know how to let loose and have a good time. 
• You like being part of a team that has a reputation for excellence and gives back to the community by educating, mentoring, and sponsoring. 
• You want to work on products and accounts that have outsized impact and reach. 
• You believe in sweating the details, giving a damn about quality, and taking pride in going the extra mile.

• Experience leading software engineering teams.
• Experience teaching, mentoring, and motivating software engineers.
• Experience with strategic planning, leading and facilitating technical problem solving, designing technical solutions in a team environment, and motivating and managing teams to successful execution.
• Experience setting and maintaining standards and expectations for software development best practices, code reviews, testing, and application monitoring.
• At least 7-10 years of software engineering experience, ideally in a consulting environment or as part of an in-house, cross-functional product team.
• Experience building consumer-facing native mobile and web applications, with a fluent command of the native languages and core frameworks.
• Demonstrated expertise architecting, building, maintaining, and scaling modern software on various platforms.
• Ability to understand client expectations, the work the team has done and still has to do to meet those expectations, and the ability to motivate the team to successfully deliver on time and on budget.
• Experience with public speaking and writing on engineering-related topics.
• Excellent communication skills and a strong ability to present and defend technical and architectural choices persuasively.
• Renowned problem-solving skills.Above-average discipline and personal organization skills.
• A demonstrated hunger for personal and professional growth.
• A self-evident love and care for the craft of software engineering.

• Have strong illustration chops as it relates to technical diagramming.
• Have publicly released your own personal, self-started products or apps.
• Enjoy tinkering with emerging languages and platforms such as Go, Rust, Alexa, and/or Unity.

What to expect

When applying, please include a short note about yourself, a summary of your work experience, and a link to any public profiles you actively maintain (e.g. GitHub, LinkedIn, etc).

Our hiring process moves quickly and consists of several stages for candidates who capture our attention with their initial submission, sometimes including but not limited to a short preliminary phone interview, a series of video interviews, and a short take-home exercise which you'll have up to a week to complete.

Additional information

We go out of our way to evaluate all employees and job applicants equally based on merit, competence, and qualifications. We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply and consider all qualified applicants.