Hands-On Technical Leadership for a Data and AI-Driven SaaS Company
We are partnering with a profitable, growing SaaS company to identify a Director of Engineering & Data Strategy.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role.
The company is not looking for an executive who wants to step away from engineering and focus exclusively on people management, planning, and meetings. The right leader will be capable of setting technical strategy, leading a talented engineering team, and remaining actively involved in the work.
You will architect systems, evaluate technologies, review code, build prototypes, troubleshoot difficult problems, and contribute directly when the team needs additional technical horsepower.
At the same time, you will lead and develop the engineering organization, establish priorities, improve execution, and work closely with the CEO and product leadership to shape the company’s next generation of products.
The company sits on large volumes of proprietary, mission-critical data and continues to collect more. The opportunity is to determine how that data can be structured, connected, analyzed, and activated through modern software, big data architecture, artificial intelligence, and agentic workflows.
This role is designed for an exceptional Engineering Manager, Director of Engineering, Principal Engineer, Head of Engineering, or Data Engineering leader who wants broader ownership without giving up the work they love.
The Core Mandate:
You will have three closely connected responsibilities:
- Lead and develop a small, highly capable engineering team, and assist with new market segment growth.
- Remain technically involved in architecture, development, prototyping, and problem-solving.
- Build the data and AI strategy that will support the company’s expansion into adjacent industries.
Success requires strength in all three areas.
A candidate who only wants to code will not be the right fit. A candidate who only wants to manage will not be the right fit.
The ideal candidate is a player-coach who can move comfortably between an executive strategy conversation, a product roadmap meeting, an architectural decision, and a detailed technical problem.
What You Will Do:
Lead the Engineering Team
- Lead, mentor, and develop a small team of talented engineers.
- Create clarity around priorities, ownership, technical standards, and delivery expectations.
- Help the team move quickly while maintaining quality, reliability, security, and scalability.
- Recruit additional high-caliber engineers as the company grows.
- Build a culture of accountability, curiosity, practical problem-solving, and strong technical judgment.
Build Alongside the Team
- Remain actively involved in software development and technical execution.
- Design and architect systems that process, connect, and activate large datasets.
- Write and review code when it meaningfully advances the product or helps solve a difficult problem.
- Build prototypes and proofs of concept to validate new products, technical approaches, and AI capabilities.
- Participate in debugging, performance optimization, system design, and technical problem-solving.
- Help establish patterns, frameworks, and foundations that other engineers can extend.
- Stay close enough to the codebase to make informed decisions based on the actual technology, not only status reports.
Define the Data and AI Strategy
- Develop the technical strategy for turning proprietary data into differentiated products and capabilities.
- Design scalable approaches to data ingestion, transformation, storage, retrieval, enrichment, and analysis.
- Identify opportunities to apply large language models, machine learning, intelligent automation, and agentic workflows.
- Build systems that allow AI agents to retrieve information, reason across data, complete multi-step processes, make recommendations, and support human decision-making.
- Establish practical approaches to AI evaluation, reliability, monitoring, privacy, security, and human oversight.
- Distinguish commercially valuable AI applications from experimentation that does not create measurable value.
Shape the Product Roadmap
- Work directly with the CEO and product leadership to identify opportunities within current and adjacent markets.
- Translate business and customer problems into product and technical solutions.
- Help determine which systems should be built internally, purchased, integrated, or developed with external partners.
- Evaluate new technologies based on business value rather than novelty.
- Connect engineering investments to customer outcomes, revenue opportunities, operational leverage, and long-term competitive advantage.
What We Are Looking For
- Deep software engineering experience with the ability and desire to remain hands-on.
- Current or recent experience writing, reviewing, or directly contributing to production software.
- Experience leading engineers as an Engineering Manager, Director of Engineering, Head of Engineering, Principal Engineer, Technical Lead, or similar role.
- Strong experience with backend engineering, cloud infrastructure, data platforms, distributed systems, or data-intensive applications.
- Experience designing systems that ingest, process, connect, or analyze large and complex datasets.
- Practical knowledge of modern AI systems, including large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, workflow orchestration, or agentic architectures.
- The ability to move between technical detail, product thinking, organizational leadership, and executive strategy.
- Strong architectural judgment and the ability to make pragmatic tradeoffs.
- Experience shipping real products in a startup, growth-stage SaaS company, or similarly fast-moving environment.
- A low-ego leadership style and a willingness to solve whatever problem is most important, regardless of title.
This Role Is Probably Right for You If:
- You have 10+ years in Development and you still like opening the codebase, testing an idea, reviewing a pull request, or working through a complex technical problem.
- You want executive-level ownership without becoming disconnected from the product.
- You can lead a technical strategy discussion in the morning and build a working prototype in the afternoon.
- You see data as a product asset, not simply a reporting function.
- You understand that agentic AI requires thoughtful architecture, reliable data, evaluation, safeguards, and clear business use cases.
- You prefer a small, elite team where each person has significant ownership.
- You are comfortable operating without layers of process or management around you.
This Role Is Probably Not Right for You If:
- You want to lead exclusively through managers.
- You no longer want to write, review, or meaningfully engage with code.
- You prefer to delegate architecture and technical decisions entirely to others.
- You are primarily a business intelligence, reporting, analytics, or data governance leader without a strong software engineering background.
- Your AI experience is limited to selecting vendors or adding basic large language model functionality to an existing application.
- You need a large team, extensive resources, or a highly structured environment to be effective.
Pay: $200,000.00 - $250,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Dental insurance
- Health insurance
- Paid time off
- Vision insurance
Application Question(s):
- Do you love big data and Ai and know a few things about it?
- Have you either led a team (big or small) or been a player coach/team lead?
- Do you have at least 10 years in Development/SaaS?
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Draper, UT 84020
