Director of Engineering, Canoe

• Systems Expertise: Demonstrated ability to architect and deliver scalable, production-ready systems
• Pragmatic Problem-Solver: You've actually implemented engineering workflows using Claude Code or similar tools to ship production code by breaking down complex problems into pragmatic solutions
• Change Agent: Track record of driving organizational change against resistance through clear, data-driven communication
• Incident Management: Strong experience with on-call leadership and retrospectives with a strong understanding of security and governance principles
• User Experience Focus: Deep understanding that velocity without quality is meaningless; passionate about delivering value through a trustworthy, reliable product
• Engineering Leadership: Experience managing managers and leading through influence, building coalitions

Desirable

• Startups forming today with AI-native processes will out-execute traditional engineering teams by 10x. We need someone who gets this viscerally—not theoretically—and can lead our transformation. You'll lead three critical functions (QA, SRE, Architecture) through a fundamental reimagining of how we build software.
• This isn't just about adding tools to existing processes—it's about rebuilding our entire approach around AI-human collaboration. Your mission is to deliver exceptional value to our clients by ensuring our systems are not just functional at launch, but also performant, reliable, and secure as they scale - and in a way optimized for how the software of tomorrow is built
• Architectural Vision: Participate in the Architecture Review Board (ARB), ensuring all architecture decisions are optimized for resilience, flexibility, and speed of iteration
• Make Everyone Faster with AI: Your #1 job is practical AI implementation that delivers immediate velocity gains
• Revolutionary QA Transformation: Lead the product and engineering team through a complete identity shift as they stop manually writing requirements, code, and tests; instead relying on agentic tools for specification-driven development and automated verifications
• Proactive Production Quality: Build observability that finds bugs before customers do. Move from reactive incident management to predictive reliability
• Lead Through Influence: Drive this transformation across all teams without formal authority. You're a change agent who can overcome organizational inertia, build coalitions, and make the AI-native approach so compelling that folks adopt it enthusiastically