Director of Engineering, Smartsheet
Grid Platform & Reporting Services
$235-315k
Plus in addition, this role will be eligible for a market competitive incentive opportunity
Dynamic workspace platform for collaboration
Be an early applicant
Dynamic workspace platform for collaboration
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$235-315k
Plus in addition, this role will be eligible for a market competitive incentive opportunity
1001+ employees
Company mission
to empower anyone to drive meaningful change — for themselves, their businesses, and the world.
Role
Who you are
- 11+ years of software engineering and system architecture experience, with meaningful depth in distributed systems and high-availability platform infrastructure
- 5+ years in engineering leadership with a track record of leading through multiple layers of management across a complex technical and product charter: owning both platform infrastructure and user-facing product surfaces simultaneously
- A track record of owning and operating tier 0 or mission-critical services at five-nines availability, and the hands-on technical credibility with engineers that comes from understanding the work deeply
- Demonstrated ability to translate between technical complexity and business outcomes, making infrastructure decisions legible to executives and product strategy legible to engineers
- A track record of customer empathy in practice: using customer context to prioritize platform investments and user-facing roadmaps in ways that drive measurable business outcomes
- Experience leading full-stack engineering organizations, with depth on the backend and enough front-end fluency to hold a high bar across the whole stack
- Hands-on experience designing or evolving distributed architectures under scale constraints, including caching strategies, data consistency tradeoffs, and performance optimization at volume
- Experience building and scaling cloud-native services on AWS, with proficiency in observability tooling, alerting, and SLO/SLA management at scale
- Experience leading cross-functional technical programs with significant ambiguity and cross-team dependencies; you deliver results under tough circumstances
- Strong CS fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, object-oriented design, and familiarity with Agile/Scrum and DevOps/CI/CD practices
- Clear, proactive communication (written and verbal) with technical and non-technical audiences, including executive leadership
- A BS or MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- Legally eligible to work in the U.S. on an ongoing basis
What the job involves
- Smartsheet's Grid Platform is the engine behind intelligent work management for millions of users worldwide
- As Director of Engineering for Views Platform and Reporting, you will own that engine: the Grid Service, Reports Engine, Dynamic Views, and Grid Orchestration layer that power the entire product, plus the reporting surfaces and views that millions of customers interact with every day
- Enterprise growth is core to Smartsheet's strategic imperatives, and this role helps shape and drive how that vision comes to life
- The services in this pillar's remit span critical platform infrastructure and the business-critical end-user features at the center of enterprise customers' most pressing project and portfolio management challenges: as critical a combination as exists in the product. A successful leader here brings deep technical credibility, a proven ability to translate between platform requirements and business outcomes, and a track record of driving results through an org of 30–50 engineers, managers, and principal engineers
- Few engineering leadership roles offer this combination: foundational platform ownership with direct visibility into the product experience it enables
- You will report to the Senior Director of Engineering and can be based in our Bellevue, WA office or work remotely from anywhere in the US where Smartsheet is a registered employer
- Own the engineering vision, charter, and goals for the Views Platform and Reporting pillar, partnering with your product counterpart to co-drive roadmap priorities across the Grid Service, Reports Engine, Dynamic Views, Grid Orchestration layer, and user-facing reporting surfaces
- Lead 3-4 teams through a layer of Engineering Managers and Principal Engineers, holding them accountable for delivery, reliability, and team health while actively developing them as leaders
- Drive architectural evolution of the core platform, balancing five-nines availability commitments against the scalability investments required to power Smartsheet's enterprise growth trajectory
- Own the full reporting stack: both the backend infrastructure and the front-end reporting views and surfaces that enterprise customers depend on for project and portfolio management
- Define and track engineering and business outcomes for the pillar, including SLO/SLA targets and production reliability signals. Identify systematic production challenges and build pillar-level mechanisms to address them before they become customer issues
- Initiate and guide cross-team technical efforts spanning multiple upstream dependents and internal consumers, resolving architectural conflicts and making bold decisions that position the platform for future scale
- Set and maintain a high bar across code quality, test coverage, performance, security, and operational excellence, and build the mechanisms to sustain it at the pillar level
- Think strategically about customer outcomes, guiding managers and principal engineers to address existing gaps and anticipate future enterprise needs. Represent the pillar in customer conversations as a technical advisor
- Communicate platform complexity clearly across a wide range of audiences, from your engineering org to executive leadership. Produce clear written artifacts for strategic vision, long-term plans, and pillar reviews that align teams and inform decisions
- Drive AI adoption across the pillar, holding leaders accountable for AI productivity, enabling AI-first design decisions, and ensuring alignment with cross-product AI strategy
- Lead strategic hiring planning for the pillar, model a high bar for talent, and build an inclusive culture that develops and retains strong engineering managers and principal engineers
Our take
With teams increasingly moving to remote work across many industries, companies have been reaching for tools to keep operations smooth and communications open. Founded in 2005, Smartsheet is a cloud-based work management platform helping a vast range of companies, from small businesses to large enterprises, plan, track, and report on work.
Like other team collaboration software companies, such as Lucid and Atlassian, Smartsheet saw strong growth in the early 2020s and achieved 17% year-on-year revenue increases through 2025. If the company can maintain this success, it stands to make real gains in a global team collaboration market expected to be worth about $20 billion by 2028.
Smartsheet has embedded itself across various industries, with deep integrations with applications from the likes of Salesforce, Atlassian, Google, and Microsoft, making it the first work management sector Unicorn to reach $1 billion in recurring annual revenue in 2024. Thanks to its successes, it was bought by Blackstone and Vista Equity Partners for $8.4 billion in 2025 with an eye on further international scaling, leveraging the reach of its new parent companies.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
7% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
May 2017
$60.9m
SERIES F
May 2014
$35m
SERIES E
Total funding: $128.3m
Company benefits
- Lucrative Employee Stock Purchase Program (15% discount)
- 401k Match to help you save for your future (50% of your contribution up to the first 6% of your eligible pay)
- Monthly stipend to support your work and productivity
- Flexible Time Away Program, plus Incidental Sick Leave
- Up to 24 weeks of Parental Leave
- Personal paid Volunteer Day to support our community
- Opportunities for professional growth and development including access to LinkedIn Learning online courses
- Company Funded Perks, including a counseling membership, primary care membership, local retail discounts, and your own personal Smartsheet account
- Teleworking options from any registered location (role specific)
- HSA, 100% employer-paid premiums, or Buy-up medical/vision and dental coverage options for full-time employees
- Equity - Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) with all offers
- US employees are automatically covered under Smartsheet-sponsored life insurance, short-term, and long-term disability plans
- US employees receive 12 paid holidays per year
Company HQ
West Bellevue, Bellevue, WA
Leadership
Mark Mader
(President & CEO)Having studied at Dartmouth, Mark spent 2 years as a Greenwich Associates Research Associate before 10 years at Onyx Software. They then founded Smartsheet in 2005 as CEO.
Brent Frei
(Founder & Board Member)Brent worked at Motorola and Microsoft for 4 years before founding Onyx Software in 1994 and Smartsheet in 2005. They have been a Board Member since, alongside working as CEO of TerraClear.
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