Director of Engineering

Brilliant Smart Home; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Subsidized benefits

Job summary

Brilliant NextGen is seeking a Director of Engineering (Backend) to lead a small team of engineers and contractors, owning the backend stack and cloud infra. You will design scalable APIs, implement distributed systems, and drive AI/LLM integrations in a fast-growing smart home platform.

Reporting to the CEO, you’ll mentor engineers, guide technical strategy, and collaborate with product, design, and leadership to deliver reliable features and robust AWS-based solutions.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience with 3+ years in leadership/management.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• Deep experience with Python, AWS, Terraform, Linux, PostgreSQL, Redis, and gRPC.
• Strong background in distributed systems and modern backend design.
• Excellent communication and ability to lead technical initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of engineers and contractors, guiding architectural decisions.
• Architect, build, test, deploy, and maintain backend features and services.
• Design and extend GraphQL/REST APIs for Python-based services.
• Develop and maintain gRPC backends and integrations with Redis and PostgreSQL.
• Manage AWS infrastructure with Terraform and improve CI/CD pipelines.
• Mentor teammates and elevate engineering standards across the org.

Skills

Python

AWS

Terraform

Linux

PostgreSQL

Redis

gRPC

Distributed systems

Shell scripting

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

Director of Engineering - Backend Engineer (10+ years experience)

Company Description

Brilliant NextGen is transforming the smart home experience for builders, home owners, smart home professionals, and condos/apartment buildings. Our award winning, all-in-one control platform, mobile app and connected ecosystem make it easy for integrators, builders, and homeowners to create beautifully designed, easily approachable intelligent living spaces. With a focus on design, simplicity, and performance, we’re making smart home technology feel easy, intuitive, and approachable for all.We’re a fast-growing, Series-A team passionate about bridging design and technology to elevate the smart home experience for customers. If you’re excited about building a category-defining brand in smart home innovation and shaping how people experience connected living, we’d love to meet you.

Role Description

As the Director of Engineering at Brilliant, you will play a key player/coach role in leading a small team of four full-time employee engineers and three full time engineering contractors who architect, build, and maintain the systems that power the Brilliant ecosystem. In addition, you will have a hands‑on role working across our full backend and infrastructure stack, spanning API development, distributed backend systems, AWS infrastructure, DevOps automation, and IoT communications to ensure the stability of the platform and deliver new features meaningful to the growth of the company. This role is ideal for someone who has engineering team management experience, understands modern large‑scale distributed systems, and is an expert in deploying with LLMs and AI agents to push the boundaries of what’s possible in modern software development.Reporting to the CEO, this position plays an important role in the leadership and strategy of the company.

You’ll collaborate closely with the mobile, firmware, and backend engineers on the team, product managers, designers, and the leadership team to plan and deliver new features, ensure system reliability, and evolve our cloud architecture. You’ll also help guide technical strategy, mentor teammates, and elevate engineering standards across the organization.

Responsibilities

Leadership & Management

• Lead a team of 7 engineers (FTE + Contract).
• Estimate work efforts, collaborate on requirements, and plan dev sprints in coordination with Product leadership.
• Participate in the strategic direction of the company in collaboration with the rest of the Senior Leadership team.
• Architect, build, test, deploy, and maintain backend features and services.
• Design and extend GraphQL and RESTful APIs for Python-based services.
• Develop and maintain gRPC backends and integrations with Redis and PostgreSQL.
• Support communication and backend integrations for our fleet of Brilliant Controls (IoT).
• Mentor engineers, improve architecture quality, and drive backend best practices.

DevOps & Infrastructure

• Architect, manage, and extend our AWS infrastructure using Terraform, Packer, and related tools.
• Improve and scale our Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines.
• Deploy, manage, and debug Linux servers and container-based systems.
• Enhance observability using systems like Prometheus and Grafana to detect issues proactively.
• Maintain infrastructure, tools, dependencies, and security posture.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with product, design, and engineering teams to deliver new features and refine existing experiences.
• Lead and collaborate on reliability improvements, workflow simplification, and operational best practices across the engineering organization.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in backend engineering; with at least 3 years of engineering team management
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• Deep experience with Python, modern programming languages, and shell scripting.
• Strong expertise with AWS and core cloud infrastructure services.
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
• Strong background in Linux systems.
• Solid experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and caching systems (Redis).
• Background with gRPC, distributed systems
• Excellent communication skills and experience leading technical initiatives.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with GraphQL and REST API design.
• Strong interest and hands‑on experimentation with LLMs or AI agents.
• Background with real-time data communication.
• Experience with containerization andcontainer orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Work with Prometheus, Grafana, and observability pipelines.
• Experience supporting IoT systems or device fleets.
• Familiarity with advanced AWS patterns and tooling (VPC networking, IAM, autoscaling).
• An interest in video streaming protocols (WebRTC, RTSP)

Compensation

$150,000 -$190,000/Year + Equity + Subsidized Benefits