GiveDirectly has delivered more than $1B in cash directly to 2+ million people living in poverty across 15 countries since 2011. We believe cash transfers are one of the most scalable, cost-effective, and dignified forms of aid, with the research to back it up. Our work has been covered by The Economist, NPR, TED, and The Washington Post. We are one of Time100’s Most Influential Companies of 2026.
Our culture is candid, analytical, and non-hierarchical. We support high ownership and real professional growth. Curious about what it's really like to work here? Read our values and hear from the people who do. If they resonate, this could be a great fit!
Location: This role is fully remote but will directly manage team members spanning East Africa Time to US Pacific Time. You must overlap with East Africa Time by at least 3 hours. As an example, 6PM East Africa Time is 11AM US Eastern time in the summer and 10AM in the winter. In practice, if you are in the Eastern US timezone, that means being regularly available for 8AM meetings and some 7AM ones. We know people have commitments like school drop-offs, so you’re encouraged to set a schedule that works for you—as long as there’s sufficient overlap with the team. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of employment Visas in the U.S. or U.K. at this time.
About this role
We’re hiring a Director of Engineering to build a best-in-class engineering department in a moment of rapid growth; we’ve more than doubled our engineering team in the last year and are continuing to hire.
Your initial focus will be on our cash delivery platform: you'll own the technical systems that deliver the next $4B to people in extreme poverty, our goal for the next nine years, with scenarios on the table that would require us to scale much faster. We recently launched a platform rebuild as a greenfield project, and the work ahead is scaling it from initial launch to delivering billions. This role is deliberately sequenced: you'll start close to the ground — directly managing engineers, partnering with our platform product lead on roadmap and delivery, and getting deep in the operational details (on-call, incident response) — because we believe the leader who builds that context firsthand is the one who can design the right organization for the next level of scale.
You will own maintaining and scaling a strong engineering culture through rapid growth: shaping how we hire and structure teams, recruiting and retaining a high talent density team, and building strong operating processes and culture that encourage open debate in search of the best outcomes for recipients rather than attachment to being right or looking good; continuous learning, improvement, and adoption of new tools; deep product ownership in service of impact for recipients; and strong judgment about tradeoffs. You'll set a high technical quality bar, pressure-testing designs and tradeoffs while still giving a very senior team high autonomy.
You’ll shape our multi-year technical strategy: where the platform should be shared across product lines versus split or modular, when to build versus buy versus extend, how to sequence major architectural transitions, and how to balance investment with feature development. You optimize for recipient impact, not the most interesting technical problem. We're not driven by hot new technical trends; we're building the hard tech that matters to recipients — integrations with mobile money rails and delivery in low-connectivity contexts.
You'll represent engineering at the senior leadership level and own the interface between engineering and team members who haven't worked heavily with a product development organization before. That means learning our programs and the realities of our field teams, and working with partner teams to build our development practices, whether building trust that an MVP is a starting point rather than a final answer, or helping teams see why it’s worth taking time out of their urgent delivery goals to give feedback on a demo or try something new.
As GiveDirectly scales, technology is what allows us to reach more people without breaking. Your leadership means getting more cash to the people who need it most.
Reports to: VP of Technology
Level: Director
Travel Requirement: Must be able to travel ~3-4 times per year to one of our countries of operation for team retreats or field visits
What you’ll do:
- Own the engineering organization for our cash delivery platform: its structure, staffing strategy, and operating model — and redesign these as the team grows, including deciding when and how to build out a management layer (today: 6 engineers on the cash delivery platform, 11 engineers total; additional hires planned this year)
- Own multi-year technical strategy for the platform: defining interfaces and boundaries between domains, determining when to build versus buy versus extend, and how to sequence major architectural transitions — driving the biggest bets to a decision with the Platform Product Lead, VP of Technology, and leadership
- Protect and scale the culture as we grow: open debate, product ownership, continuous improvement, and strong engineering foundations
- Own engineering delivery — the commitments leadership and stakeholders plan against, platform reliability, and the trade-offs between roadmap speed and platform investment — in close partnership with the Platform Product Lead
- Drive operational excellence, including on-call, incident response, code quality, testing, AI, and deployment practices
- Represent engineering at the leadership level: translate technical realities into business decisions and vice versa, and partner with diverse stakeholders to create the enabling environment for product development
- Coach and develop engineers through 1:1s, feedback, career planning, and performance management; hire, onboard, and retain a strong, inclusive team
- Set the technical quality bar: stay close enough to the technical work to weigh in on architecture, review designs, and help the team make sound trade-offs, without becoming the bottleneck
What you’ll bring:
- Exceptional alignment with GiveDirectly Values and active demonstration of our core competencies: emotional intelligence, problem solving, project management, follow-through, and fostering inclusivity. We welcome and strongly encourage applications from candidates who have personal or professional experience in the low-income and/or historically marginalized communities that we serve.
- Language Requirement: English
- 5+ years managing engineers, including experience leading multiple teams or a larger engineering organization through full delivery cycles
- 10+ years of overall industry experience building production software, with a strong backend foundation (databases, cloud services, APIs)
- Demonstrated ability to recruit, coach, develop, and retain engineers, building and retaining a talent-dense and inclusive team during periods of high growth
- Track record of building a strong engineering culture including candid, ego-free debate, deep product ownership, and continuously raising the bar on craft and tooling (including agentic engineering)
- You enable speed through focus and create clarity in ambiguity: cutting through complexity to the strategic kernel and shielding the team from distraction, so a senior team can move fast and autonomously
- Strong technical judgment driven by the mission, not ego: you can pressure-test architecture decisions with very senior engineers, have made consequential calls and lived with the results, and weigh technical and non-technical tradeoffs by recipient impact
- Energized to build product-development fluency in an organization that's relatively new to it: you've successfully partnered with non-technical stakeholders and leaders, and you’re excited by this, rather than daunted by it
Compensation
At GiveDirectly, we strive to pay our employees generously and equitably. We use an accredited third party salary aggregator to calculate what we believe to be competitive pay based on role, location, and cost of living. We also have a no negotiation policy to ensure we are paying staff equitably across roles. Read more about our compensation philosophy here.
We're currently finalizing the new benchmarks for this role and will update this posting with our US, UK, and Kenya figures in the next few days. Since the role is fully remote, if you're not based in any of these countries, we'll share an estimated salary benchmark for the country you're based in during the hiring process.
#LI-REMOTE
Working at GiveDirectly
GiveDirectly is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants are considered for employment without regard to the person’s race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
Flagging for US applicants: We invite you to "Know Your Rights" as an applicant.
Commitment to Safeguarding
As a global organization working with communities to eliminate extreme poverty, GiveDirectly takes the safeguarding of its recipients, staff, and partners seriously. To that end, GiveDirectly is a member of the Misconduct Disclosure Scheme, and will systematically check with previous employers about any abuse or misconduct related matters involving potential new hires. We may also employ other robust pre-hire screens, including in-depth reference checks, criminal background checks, and sanctions screens.
These efforts help us continue to build and maintain trust with the communities we work with, and prevent abuse to our recipients and staff.
**GD is committed to observing all local, national and international laws that protect people and basic human rights of all. GD is committed to a policy of “zero tolerance when it comes to preventing, reporting, or responding to any form of abuse or exploitation.” and expects anyone who works for GD to uphold the protection and safeguarding of our recipients as a priority.**
Reasonable Accommodations
We are committed to fostering an inclusive and accessible work environment. If you require any accommodations during the application or interview process, or to perform the essential functions of the role, please email us at [email protected] with the email subject “Accommodation Needed”. We will work with you to ensure reasonable accommodations are made to support your needs.
Want to put your best foot forward on your GiveDirectly application? Take a look at our Candidate Application Prep Guide!
Know the right person for this role? Please consider referring them. We offer a reward of $3,000 for a Senior Manager or above role, and $500 for a Manager role, paid if we end up hiring your referral. Thank you for sending great people our way!
