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Collective is a fintech platform empowering self-employed professionals and small business owners with integrated accounting, tax, bookkeeping, and community services. The company is backed by top-tier investors including General Catalyst, Sound Ventures, QED Investors, and Google's Gradient Ventures.
As Director of Engineering, you will lead the technical strategy and execution of Collective's core product platform. This is a people leadership role with significant hands-on technical contribution—a true player-coach position. You'll manage multiple engineering managers and senior engineers, fostering a high-performance culture while maintaining your own technical depth.
Key responsibilities include:
- Leading and mentoring engineering managers and individual contributors, building a culture of excellence and empathy
- Owning end-to-end delivery of complex, multi-disciplinary engineering projects across the platform
- Driving architectural decisions and ensuring technical clarity across teams working with Python/Django backends and React frontends
- Collaborating closely with Product, Design, and Operations to ship fast and iterate based on customer feedback
- Championing modern AI tools and agent-based workflows to accelerate development and unlock new capabilities
- Managing team processes and effectively interfacing with non-technical stakeholders
- Contributing to company-wide engineering initiatives and executive-level strategic conversations
You'll need 8-10+ years of software engineering experience with at least 4+ years in management roles. You should have demonstrated success operating as a player-coach, maintaining hands-on technical proficiency while scaling teams. Experience with full-stack systems, architecture design, and data modeling is essential. You'll bring organizational leadership skills, comfort collaborating across functions, and a proven track record of building healthy, supportive, and challenging work environments.
The role is hybrid based in San Francisco with flexibility for remote work. Collective offers competitive benefits including 100% medical/dental/vision coverage, 401k with equity, 16 weeks paid parental leave, flexible PTO, and quarterly team events.
