Director of Software Engineering

Profitable, fast-scaling eCommerce and 3PL platform is hiring a Director of Engineering to modernize and scale mission-critical systems across warehouse management, internal operations, and client-facing analytics. You’ll lead a lean team (internal + nearshore), own architectural direction, and drive modernization from legacy tooling to event-driven, API-based systems. This is a high-urgency, high-visibility role with direct executive exposure and real operational impact. Hybrid in San Diego.

POSITION DETAILS

This is a key Engineering Leadership role for a high-growth, operationally complex ecommerce and logistics company that is investing heavily in its technology infrastructure to support increasing warehouse throughput, revenue tracking and generation, brand expansion, and customer requirements.

Revenue and operational scale are accelerating, and leadership is committed to modernizing core platforms, formalizing engineering standards, and building scalable infrastructure that supports long-term growth. This is a strategic and execution-oriented leadership role. You will own engineering direction across three active work streams:

• Client-facing analytics and dashboard platform
• Internal operational tools supporting workflows and reporting
• Warehouse management system (WMS) being rebuilt from legacy scripts and spreadsheets into a modern backend architecture

What You’ll Own

Engineering Strategy & Architecture

• Define and execute the multi-year engineering roadmap aligned to business scale.
• Modernize legacy scripting environments into event-driven, API-based systems.
• Establish strong modeling discipline, governance, and technical standards.
• Guide decisions around cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, and system reliability.
• Ensure systems are scalable, maintainable, and resilient under increasing transaction volume.

WMS Modernization Oversight

• Oversee migration of operational workflows (returns, shipping, fulfillment visibility) to modern backend services.
• Partner closely with the Lead Software Engineer to ensure clean architecture, performance, and documentation.
• Reduce institutional knowledge risk and eliminate brittle legacy dependencies.
• Lead internal engineers (growing, up to 20 FTE) and a nearshore development partner.
• Set performance expectations, delivery cadence, and quality standards.
• Improve sprint predictability, prioritization discipline, and execution rigor.
• Foster ownership, accountability, and pragmatic decision-making.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Translate executive-level business priorities into actionable engineering plans.
• Collaborate with Product, Data, and Operations to scope initiatives and manage tradeoffs.
• Communicate risk, technical debt, and timeline realities clearly.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 8+ years in software engineering, including 2+ years in engineering leadership.
• Proven experience modernizing legacy systems in logistics, warehousing, retail, manufacturing, or other high-throughput environments.
• Strong architecture experience in API-driven systems (Node.js / TypeScript preferred).
• Deep understanding of PostgreSQL, schema design, migrations, and performance tuning.
• Experience working with large datasets and modern data environments (BigQuery, Snowflake, etc.).
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures, webhooks, and integration-heavy ecosystems.
• Experience managing distributed or nearshore engineering teams.
• Comfortable operating in environments where infrastructure needs cleanup while new systems are being built.
• Personality: High-energy, resourceful, transparent communicator, collaborative, execution-focused, able to herd cats.
• Location : must reside in the San Diego (downtown area), able to work in hybrid onsite model ~3 days/week.

Ideal Candidate Profile

• You’re an experienced engineering leader who is energized by replacing something broken with something that works and seeing the direct impact.
• You take ownership. You don’t wait for perfect requirements; you ask the right questions, make reasonable decisions, and keep moving.
• You can navigate ambiguity in a legacy codebase without getting stuck. You’ve been handed a half-finished project before and shipped it.
• You’re collaborative without being dependent. You can work independently for stretches and sync up effectively with leadership when it matters.

#J-18808-Ljbffr