Director of Engineering, Technical Infrastructure

Compass; Madison (NJ); On-site; USD 275,000 - 306,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Incentive programs

Paid vacation

Holidays & sick time

Parental leave

Recharge leave

Medical benefits

Dental & vision benefits

401(k) plan

FSAs

Commuter program

Life & disability insurance

Maven support

Fertility benefits

UrbanSitter

Employee Assistance Program

Pet insurance

Job summary

Compass is seeking a Director of Engineering for Technical Infrastructure to own the platform engineers rely on. You will shape the Golden Path across cloud, build and release, data infra, and AI-enabled development, guiding multiple teams and setting multi-year strategy.

You will grow Engineering Managers, design scalable org structures, and drive cost discipline while maintaining high reliability and developer productivity.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering with deep infrastructure or platform depth.
• 8+ years of engineering management including hiring, developing, and promoting engineers and leading senior ICs.
• Ownership of a large shared technology surface with cross-team adoption and standards.
• Strong command of AWS (GCP a plus) and cost observability in cloud environments.
• Experience setting reliability targets, incident management, and progressive delivery.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguity and translate problems into structured plans.
• Security and compliance aptitude in cloud environments (SOC 2, PCI DSS).

Responsibilities

• Set the long-term technical direction for the Golden Path across cloud platform, build and release, data infra, developer experience, and AI-enabled lifecycle.
• Manage and grow Engineering Managers and senior technical leaders; build succession depth.
• Structure teams to cover technology areas to meet customer, business, and tech needs.
• Reduce blast radius and duration of production failures; establish observability and release safety targets.
• Shape and execute infrastructure cost-optimization strategy; track metrics and forecast costs.
• Drive build speed, testing quality, AI-assisted development, and tooling maturity for developer productivity.
• Drive high-level architectural plans and OKRs to senior leadership.

Skills

Technical depth

Manager of managers

Infra ownership

Cloud cost fluency

Reliability focus

Ambiguity tolerance

Security & compliance

Job description

At Compass, our mission is to help everyone find their place in the world. Founded in 2012, we’re revolutionizing the real estate industry with our end-to-end platform that empowers residential real estate agents to deliver exceptional service to seller and buyer clients.

About Compass International Holdings

Compass International Holdings is the largest residential real estate brokerage in the United States by sales volume. Founded in New York City in 2012 by Robert Reffkin and Ori Allon, and publicly traded on the NYSE, Compass was built on a simple premise: real estate agents are the heart of the transaction, and great technology makes them dramatically more effective.

Following the combination with Anywhere Real Estate, Compass International Holdings operates a portfolio of the most recognized brands in the industry — including Compass, Coldwell Banker, Sotheby's International Realty, Corcoran, Century 21, and ERA — supporting a combined network of over 300K agents across approximately 120 countries and territories.

What makes Compass International Holdings unusual in this industry is that we build our own software. Our end-to-end Home Platform, the Compass One client dashboard, and our AI assistant are developed in-house by engineering teams across New York, Seattle, Boston, and Miami. Technology is not a support function here; it is the product that differentiates the company. That is what makes infrastructure a first-class concern — and it is the premise of this role. Just as Compass makes agents more effective, Technical Infrastructure exists to make our Product and Engineering teams more effective.

About the Role

As Director of Engineering for Technical Infrastructure, you will own the platform that every engineer at Compass builds on. Tech Infra's mission is to empower our engineers to build, test, and ship high-quality software with maximum speed and confidence by providing a reliable, cost-effective "Golden Path" of centralized tools that eliminates operational complexity so product teams can focus on innovation. You will be accountable for that mission across compute, networking, databases, streaming, build and release systems, test infrastructure, observability, developer tooling, and the AI-enabled software development lifecycle. You will support a footprint that today spans more than 1,400 services, hundreds of managed datastores, and thousands of engineers' daily workflows.

This is a manager-of-managers role in a functional area with an expectation to shape the infrastructure architecture and technology strategy for years to come. You will own a domain where the business problem is not always defined for you and the technology strategy could be genuinely open — where part of the job is determining what the right problem is before committing the organization to solving it. You will set the high-level vision and long-term direction, make the case for resourcing initiatives that span multiple years, and take on the endemic problems that have resisted easier fixes. You will be trusted with goals that matter at the company level, and judged on outcomes rather than activity.

You will establish and evolve scalable team structures, recognizing when to create a team, when to hire a specialized role, and when teams should combine for a better outcome. You will demonstrate frugality by prioritizing the initiatives that achieve the greatest impact for the least resource, and by driving down the places where the organization applies the same engineering effort year after year. You will retain a strategic focus while staying close enough to the technology to ask the hard questions — where do we bottleneck the business, and should this system continue to exist at all. You will build closed-loop mechanisms that tell you quickly when an initiative is at risk, and act decisively.

Above all, this is a leadership role. You will grow Engineering Managers and senior technical leaders through coaching, strategic project assignment, and genuine delegation of ownership. You will partner with Principal Engineers on the decisions that outlive any single roadmap, give credit visibly, own results in both directions, and build an organization that is better for your presence but does not depend on it.

Responsibilities

• Own the Infrastructure Vision: Set the long-term technical direction for the Golden Path across cloud platform, build and release, data infrastructure, developer experience, and the AI-enabled software development lifecycle. Make the case for multi-year investment and decide what we improve, invent, deprecate, or simplify.
• Lead and Develop Leaders: Manage, coach, and grow a team of Engineering Managers and senior technical leaders, and may directly manage one or two high-impact teams in a critical technology area. Build succession depth, develop and promote top performers, and handle complex people situations with judgment.
• Design the Organization: Structure teams to encapsulate technology areas cleanly so that customer, business, and technology needs are met. Recognize when to create a team, when to hire specialized roles, and when teams should combine for a better outcome.
• Drive Reliability and Deployment Safety: Reduce the blast radius and duration of production failures for every customer. Hold the organization to incident, time-to-resolution, and availability targets, and establish mechanisms that make regressions visible before they reach production.
• Own Cost Discipline at Scale: Shape and execute infrastructure cost-optimization strategy across the organization — setting reduction targets, establishing tracking metrics, forecasting accurately, and evaluating the cost-benefit of new projects and technologies against business objectives.
• Accelerate Developer Productivity: Treat internal engineers as customers. Drive build speed and reliability, test infrastructure quality, AI-assisted development adoption, and tooling maturity — and attack recurring operational toil wherever the organization spends the same engineering effort year after year.
• Communicate Strategically: Drive high-level written and verbal communication across senior leadership — tenets, architectural plans, planning documents, and business reviews — and input into company-level technical OKR planning.

Requirements

• Strong Technical Background: 12+ years of software engineering experience with deep infrastructure or platform depth — cloud architecture, distributed systems, build and release engineering, managed data platforms, or large-scale operations.
• Manager of Managers: 8+ years of engineering management experience including proven success hiring, developing, and promoting Engineering Managers, and leading senior and staff-level ICs and geographically distributed teams.
• Infrastructure Platform Ownership: A track record owning a large, shared technology surface used by other engineering organizations, with demonstrated ability to drive adoption and standards across teams you do not control.
• Cloud and Cost Fluency: Strong command of AWS (GCP a plus) and the economics underneath it — commitment and savings-plan strategy, compute elasticity, instance and processor migrations, and cost observability as a first-class architectural concern.
• Operational Excellence: Demonstrated ability to set and hit reliability and operational targets at scale, with real experience in incident management, observability, progressive delivery, and root-cause-driven remediation.
• Comfort with Ambiguity: A self-starter who can take an undefined business problem and open technology strategy and produce a structured, phased, resourced plan — and who distinguishes clearly between one-way and two-way doors.
• Security and Compliance Aptitude: Solid understanding of enterprise security concepts including IAM, zero-trust and service-to-service authorization, least privilege, data isolation, and regulatory compliance standards (e.g., SOC 2, PCI DSS) in cloud environments.

Compensation: The base pay range for this position is $275,310-$305,900; however, base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Bonuses and restricted stock units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to a full range of benefits. Base pay is based on market location. Minimum wage for the position will always be met.

Perks that You Need to Know About:

Participation in our incentive programs (which may include eligible cash, equity, or commissions). Plus paid vacation, holidays, sick time, parental leave, and recharge leave; medical, tele-health, dental and vision benefits; 401(k) plan; flexible spending accounts (FSAs); commuter program; life and disability insurance; Maven (a support system for new parents); Carrot (fertility benefits); UrbanSitter (caregiver referral network); Employee Assistance Program; and pet insurance.

Do your best work, be your authentic self.

At Compass, we believe that everyone deserves to find their place in the world — a place where they feel like they belong, where they can be their authentic selves, where they can thrive. Our collaborative, energetic culture is grounded in our Compass Entrepreneurship Principles and our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, growth and mobility. As an equal opportunity employer, we offer competitive compensation packages, robust benefits and professional growth opportunities aimed at helping to improve our employees' lives and careers.

Notice for California Applicants

Los Angeles County Fair Chance Notice