Senior Director of Engineering, Couchbase
$268-315k
Office located in Santa Clara, CA
Operational data platform for AI
Job no longer available
Operational data platform for AI
501-1000 employees
Job no longer available
$268-315k
Office located in Santa Clara, CA
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To simplify how organizations develop, deploy, and run modern applications wherever they are.
Role
Who you are
- 10+ years of experience delivering large-scale, distributed, cloud-native systems in production
- 5+ years leading engineering organizations across multiple teams and technical domains
- Expertise in at least two major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), including deep understanding of services and infrastructure
- Strong technical background in backend development, distributed systems, and infrastructure automation
- Proficiency in modern development tools and cloud-native technologies (e.g., Golang, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform)
- Proven ability to lead complex technical organizations, drive SDLC execution, and scale teams and processes in dynamic, fast-paced environments
- Excellent collaboration and communication skills across engineering, product, and operational functions
What the job involves
- Join our innovative software engineering team at Couchbase as the Sr. Director of Software Engineering for Capella, our advanced DBaaS platform built on AWS, GCP, and Azure.
- In this role, you will oversee the delivery, operational readiness, and technical alignment of the Capella Control Plane.
- You will lead multiple engineering teams responsible for building scalable, secure, and highly available cloud services.
- Your work will directly impact customer satisfaction, platform reliability, and Capella’s ability to scale as a global DBaaS offering
- This is a hands-on technical leadership role, focused on operational execution, strategic alignment, long-term planning, and high-quality software delivery.
- You will work closely with Engineering, Product, UX, SRE, and Support to translate high-level goals into technical plans and execution.
- You’ll own SDLC processes, guide architecture, prioritize initiatives, manage technical risk, and develop engineering leaders capable of driving outcomes independently
- Own and Execute the SDLC: Lead the full development lifecycle across multiple teams, ensuring consistent execution, high code quality, and production reliability
- Ensure Architectural Alignment: Guide key architecture decisions and review designs to maintain platform scalability and consistency with technical standards
- Translate Product Requirements: Work with Product to define technical specifications that align with roadmap priorities
- Prioritize and Sequence Initiatives: Make tradeoffs across strategic and tactical work to focus teams on high-impact outcomes
- Manage Technical Risk and Debt: Identify long-term risks and technical debt; adjust plans and resourcing to mitigate them
- Coordinate Cross-Functionally: Align engineering work with UX, QA, SRE, and Infrastructure for cohesive product delivery
- Oversee Production Operations: Ensure services meet uptime goals, support on-call processes, and lead incident response coordination for critical issues
- Mentor Engineering Leaders: Develop senior engineers and managers, elevating execution and ownership across the organization
Our take
Critical functions for digital businesses such as computing and storage have become cheaper by orders of magnitude with the advent of cloud computing. However, these businesses still face the challenge of architecting their services under this paradigm. Couchbase’s NoSQL database is designed to help organizations build scalable, distributed systems that take advantage of cloud-native infrastructure.
The company's major bets on Kubernetes, mobile and NoSQL have paid off too. With many large enterprises now treating Couchbase as mission-critical infrastructure, a trajectory that culminated because of ts 2021 IPO. While it operates in a highly competitive database market, the company has continued to grow post-IPO and is now positioning itself around the next shift in enterprise architecture: AI-native applications.
The recent launch of Couchbase AI Services reflects an effort to unify operational data, vector search and model hosting within a single platform, reducing the complexity that often prevents generative AI and agent-based systems from moving beyond proof-of-concept. By embedding governance, validation and security controls directly into the data layer, Couchbase is aiming to make its database a core foundation for production AI workloads.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
16% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
May 2020
$105m
SERIES G
Mar 2016
$30m
SERIES F
Total funding: $251m
Company HQ
Cypress, San Jose, CA
Leadership
BJ Schaknowski
(CEO)Prior to joining Couchbase in 2025, BJ was the CEO of symplr. He also served as the Chief Sales & Marketing Officer at Vertafore and as an SVP of Marketing, Sales & Services at LexisNexis Software Solutions.
Veronica Curran
(CPO)Veronica Previously founded Magnolia People Solutions where she served as a Managing Partner for nearly 2 years. Prior to that, she was the Chief People and culture Officer at SmartBear and the CPO at Alumni Ventures Group.
Gopi Duddi
(CTO)Gopi joined Couchbase in 2022 as an SVP of Engineering, moving into the role of CTO in 2025. Prior to this, he spent 10 years at Amazon AWS, joining in 2012 as a Senior Manager of Database Services before moving into the role of GM. He also spent 7 years at IBM In various Managerial roles.
Josh Harbert
(CMO)Josh is also the co-founder and President of SustainableIT.org. Previously, he served as the CMO at Delphix and the VP of Marketing at Tanium and Qumulo.
Amir Jafari
(CFO)Amir is also the CFO/Head of Finance & Operations at Blend. Previously, he served as the CFO at Plastiq and Reputation.com.
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