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Polly is seeking a Director of Engineering to lead engineering execution across multiple products in a hyper-growth fintech company focused on mortgage capital markets innovation. This is a hands-on leadership role where you'll directly manage a team of senior and staff engineers without an intervening management layer, setting technical direction and maintaining accountability for delivery, quality, and architectural coherence across your product portfolio.
You'll own engineering strategy and execution for multiple products simultaneously, serving as the single point of engineering accountability for each. Your responsibilities include directly leading, mentoring, and developing senior and staff engineers across the US; hiring and performance management; setting and maintaining a coherent technical vision across products; and balancing breadth and depth as you context-switch across product domains while staying close enough to guide design decisions and solve hard problems.
You'll partner cross-functionally with Product, Design, AI/ML, and other leaders to translate business goals into technical roadmaps and measurable outcomes. You'll provide technical oversight across distributed systems, APIs, data pipelines, and core application components, contributing directly when warranted. You'll prioritize and sequence work across competing products, making pragmatic tradeoffs on resourcing and timelines, and drive operational excellence by monitoring system performance for reliability, scalability, and maintainability.
The role emphasizes hands-on technical leadership: you'll champion AI-powered tools within your team, uphold engineering best practices including code reviews and testing standards, and contribute to Polly's broader technical vision. You'll operate in a hybrid environment (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday on-site in San Francisco) within a distributed team.
Required qualifications: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field; 10+ years professional software development with strong backend (Python/Django) and modern JavaScript (Vue/React) experience; 4+ years directly managing engineers including senior/staff levels; demonstrated ownership of multiple products at scale; hands-on leadership without relying on intermediate managers; strong API design, distributed systems, and relational database expertise; SaaS and fintech experience; hands-on AI tool integration in engineering workflows.
Preferred: AWS and cloud deployment expertise (Docker, Kubernetes); experience scaling teams through hyper-growth; ownership of products at different maturity stages; financial modeling or quantitative analysis background; mortgage capital markets, hedging, or financial operations knowledge; service monitoring and log aggregation experience.
