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Palo Alto, California, United States
Onsite
We're living through a fundamental shift in how people discover, evaluate, and purchase products. The next generation doesn't respond to traditional marketing -- they build relationships with brands through authentic social interactions, seek recommendations from communities they trust, and expect personalized experiences that feel human, not corporate.
At Nectar Social, we're building the AI-native social operating system that enables this new era of commerce. We believe every social interaction should deepen the relationship between brands and their communities while creating genuine value for both sides.
Founded by ex-Meta product and engineering leaders, we've raised over $30M in total capital from investors including GV and True Ventures. We work with brands like Oura Health, Caraway, e.l.f. Cosmetics, Kosas, OLIPOP, and many more. We're building the future of social commerce -- where community, conversation, and commerce converge.
We are looking for a Director of Engineering who operates with the mindset of a product executive to lead, align, and scale our core engineering organization. Our team includes multiple core engineering groups focused on customer-facing product development, as well as a Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) function that moves fast across the full stack on high-priority enterprise initiatives. Under your leadership, these teams will build and scale high-throughput systems that ingest large volumes of social data, run real-time AI agents, and deliver insights through analytics and automation.
This is an executive-level leadership role that bridges technical vision, organizational scale, and business strategy. At the same time, you will build and empower high-performing engineering teams, manage engineering managers and leads, establish systemic technical quality, and guide our engineering organization as we scale from ~50 people into our next phase of growth.
Organizational Leadership & Team Scaling: Lead, manage, and mentor a high-performing engineering organization, including Engineering Managers and Tech Leads. Build scalable org structures, career ladders, and succession plans to retain top talent.
Product & Strategic Alignment: Partner directly with the CEO and executive peers to define long-term roadmaps, align engineering capacity with business priorities, and turn product vision into predictable technical execution.
Technical Vision & System Governance: Set the high-level technical strategy, architecture principles, and infrastructure roadmap. Ensure scalable system architecture across teams handling high-volume real-time data and AI agentic workflows.
Execution & Delivery Excellence: Drive operational rigor across all engineering teams. Establish clear metrics for delivery velocity, system reliability, code quality, and operational health.
Customer & Market Empathy: Engage directly with key enterprise customers and prospects to understand user pain points, build deep business intuition, and ensure technical investments map directly to business value.
Engineering Culture & Processes: Shape engineering culture as the company scales. Refine organizational processes around architecture reviews, incident response, resource allocation, and continuous improvement.
Hiring & Employer Brand: Partner with Talent Acquisition to scale the engineering department, driving talent acquisition strategies, executive hiring, and interviewing standards for top-tier technical talent.
Experience Level: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3+ years in a senior leadership role (Director, Head of Engineering) managing managers and leading multi-team organizations.
Track Record of Scaling: Proven experience growing engineering teams and organizational structures through key growth phases (e.g., scaling orgs from 30 to 100+ engineers).
Strategic Product Acumen: Strong business and product instincts with a track record of translating complex product objectives into achievable engineering roadmaps and resource plans.
Technical Depth: Deep foundational technical background with the ability to hold engineering teams accountable, evaluate high-level architectural trade-offs, and participate in complex technical discussions.
Executive Cross-Functional Collaboration: History of working seamlessly alongside Product, Design, Sales, and Customer Success executives in fast-paced startup environments.
Operational Mastery: Demonstrated ability to implement light-footprint, high-impact processes that maintain speed and quality without introducing unnecessary bureaucracy.
Communication & Executive Presence: Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with experience presenting technical strategy to executive leadership, boards, and customers.
Domain Expertise: Experience leading engineering teams in B2B SaaS, social data platforms, developer tools, or marketing technology.
AI & Data Infrastructure at Scale: Experience overseeing teams building, deploying, or operating AI-powered systems, real-time analytics platforms, or agentic frameworks.
Tech Stack Alignment: Strategic familiarity with modern cloud and data stacks such as AWS, TypeScript/React, Postgres, ClickHouse, and modern infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Pulumi).
Cross-Platform Leadership: Executive oversight of teams delivering both web and native mobile application ecosystems.