Director Engineering - ClearanceJobs

About the team:

As part of our Software Engineering team, you will utilize your personal and professional knowledge and experience to work with stakeholders, engineering, and Product teams to take feature requests, translate into software requirements and deliver valuable and efficient software solutions. This team plays a crucial role in ClearanceJobs' ClearanceJobs.com and AgileATS products.

About the role:

In this role, you will lead and professionally develop a team of software engineers, cultivate processes and standards, and support the delivery of software services that directly impact our clients and candidates. The tech stack is currently built with Laravel, PHP, Vue.js, AWS MySQL, AWS services, as well as a few AWS specific tools.

Your career at DHI will be filled with exciting challenges and opportunities for growth. From onboarding and familiarizing yourself with our development environment to contributing to ongoing projects and building strong relationships with your team, every day will bring new learning experiences and chances to make a difference.

Why we're hiring for this role:

At ClearanceJobs, our Engineering team brings critical national security talent and opportunity together through technology. We're hiring a Director of Engineering to lead the team that makes this mission possible-driving technical strategy, organizational growth, and innovation that scale with our expanding customer and product ambitions.

In the short term you will:

In the first 90 days in the role, you will accomplish several key milestones:

Onboarding and Familiarization: Understand the company's development environment, tools, processes, and coding standards. Get to know your team members and their roles.

Understanding the Product: Familiarize yourself with the product or projects you'll be working on. Understand the user base, key features, and the overall goal of the application.

Codebase Familiarization: Dive into the existing codebase. Understand the architecture, design patterns, and coding conventions used in the project.

Contribution to Ongoing Projects: Work on smaller tasks or bug fixes to get acquainted with the codebase and development workflow.

In the long term you will:

Learning and Skill Development: Identify areas for improvement in your development and leadership skills and start learning. This could involve learning new skills, frameworks, or tools that are relevant to your teams and projects.

Setting Goals: Set short-term and long-term goals for your role and the team. Discuss these goals with your manager to ensure alignment with the team's objectives.

Building Relationships: Build relationships with your team members, stakeholders, and other departments you'll be collaborating with. Communication is key to a successful team dynamic.

Feedback and Improvement: Seek feedback from your peers and manager regularly. Use this feedback to improve your skills and performance.

Contribution to Process and Product Improvement: As you become more familiar with the projects and processes, look for opportunities to suggest improvements in development processes or tools that could benefit the team.

Documentation and Knowledge Sharing: Document your work and share your knowledge with the team. This could include writing documentation, giving presentations, or conducting code reviews.

What you bring to the team:

• Strategic and technical vision: You stay ahead of industry trends in software engineering, cloud architecture, AI/ML, and modern development practices, bringing forward ideas that shape the long-term technical direction of ClearanceJobs Engineering.
• Leadership and collaboration: You excel at building strong partnerships across Product, Design, Marketing, and Operations, fostering alignment and trust. You lead through influence, empathy, and accountability - creating clarity even in ambiguity.
• Deep technical experience: You bring hands-on experience designing, building, and operating complex, scalable web applications and distributed systems. While you may not code daily, you maintain a strong grasp of engineering fundamentals that earn credibility with technical teams.
• Operational excellence mindset: You prioritize quality, reliability, and maintainability. You champion modern DevOps practices, continuous improvement, and data-driven decision making to enable teams to deliver securely and efficiently, at scale.
• Talent builder: You have a proven record of attracting, developing, and retaining exceptional engineering talent. You're passionate about mentoring leaders, growing future managers, and cultivating a diverse and inclusive culture of high performance.
• Customer and product orientation: You understand that technology exists to solve real customer problems. You collaborate closely with product leaders to ensure that engineering efforts deliver measurable business impact and user value.
• Strong execution and accountability: You're skilled at translating vision into action, setting clear goals, and managing through metrics and outcomes. You know how to balance innovation with predictable delivery.

Required:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline or equivalent experience.
• Extensive years of experience in software engineering, with at least 3-5 years in engineering leadership roles managing multiple teams or managing managers.
• Proven success leading high-performing engineering organizations, including responsibility for strategic planning, architecture, delivery, and operations across multiple product areas.
• Strong technical foundation in modern software architecture and design, including cloud-native systems, service-oriented or event-driven architectures, and distributed systems.
• Experience leading engineering efforts in AWS cloud environment, with familiarity in security, scalability, and observability best practices.
• Proficiency in modern development frameworks and technologies (e.g., RESTful and GraphQL APIs, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, or equivalent), with the ability to evaluate technical approaches and guide technology choices.
• Demonstrated excellence in applying DevOps and CI/CD principles, ensuring continuous delivery, automated testing, and deployment pipelines that enable speed and quality at scale.
• Experience guiding data engineering and analytics capabilities, including familiarity with modern data stack tools (e.g., dbt, Snowflake, Tableau) and best practices for data quality, governance, and performance optimization.
• Exceptional ability to translate between business and technical domains, collaborating with product, design, and business leaders to deliver outcomes that align technical investments with strategic objectives.
• Outstanding communication and interpersonal skills, capable of inspiring and aligning engineers, peers, and executives through clear, authentic, and data-driven dialogue.
• Proven track record of hiring, developing, and retaining diverse engineering talent, including mentoring managers and senior technical leaders to build strong, empowered teams.
• Commitment to operational excellence, fostering a culture of reliability, performance, and continuous improvement across engineering and production systems.

Preferred:

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering Management, or a related technical field.
• Experience scaling engineering organizations from a single team to multiple teams or business lines, including building management layers and establishing repeatable delivery processes.
• Prior leadership experience in a SaaS or high-availability platform environment, ideally supporting products with strong data, security, or identity components.
• Familiarity with Domain-Driven Design, microservices, and event-driven architectures, including practical experience guiding teams through system modernization or replatforming efforts.
• Demonstrated success in driving cross-functional OKRs and long-term technology roadmaps that balance innovation, sustainability, and operational excellence.
• Experience managing budgets and vendor partnerships for software development, cloud infrastructure, or third-party integrations.
• Exposure to AI/ML-enabled product development, data privacy, and secure software practices relevant to ClearanceJobs' mission and customers.
• Active participation in engineering communities (e.g., open-source contributions, speaking engagements, mentorship, or thought leadership).

NOTE: This job description is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of the duties and responsibilities of the job described, nor are they intended to be such a listing of the skills and abilities required to do the job. Rather, they are intended only to describe the general nature of the job as of the date this job description was prepared. Management reserves the right to modify this job in order to meet business needs.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.