Director, Software Engineering - twenty

OpenTalent; Arlington (VA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenTalent seeks a seasoned engineering leader to supervise and grow a team of managers, ensuring delivery, quality, and architectural coherence across multiple product teams.

You will shape organizational design, balance capacity, and drive the technical roadmap in collaboration with product leadership, while maintaining rigorous standards for security, reliability, and deployment readiness.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 5+ years of engineering management experience, including at least 3 years managing other engineering managers.

Responsibilities

• Own engineering execution across the product: delivery, quality, and technical accountability across all teams.
• Lead, develop, and hold accountable a set of engineering managers; build their capacity to run their teams independently.
• Drive org design decisions: team scope, composition, sequencing of team splits, and addition of new management capacity as the org grows.
• Balance engineering capacity across teams; make explicit prioritization calls when demand exceeds supply.
• Own the technical roadmap in partnership with the product manager, who owns the product and feature roadmap.
• Engage at the architecture level with senior ICs—reviewing designs, providing guidance, and ensuring technical coherence across the platform.
• Supervise hiring across engineering teams: set the bar, calibrate across managers, and close strong candidates.
• Partner with the VP of Engineering on org strategy, headcount planning, and cross-product engineering initiatives.
• Communicate clearly to senior leadership on progress, risks, and tradeoffs across the roadmap.
• Ensure engineering practices—security, quality, reliability, and operational discipline—meet the standards for mission-critical deployments.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Architecture

People development

Job description

Day to day

, you'll supervise and develop your engineering managers, balance capacity across teams, resolve cross-team dependencies, and drive the structural decisions — team composition, scope boundaries, sequencing of splits — that determine how this engineering org scales.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Own engineering execution across the product: delivery, quality, and technical accountability across all teams.
• Lead, develop, and hold accountable a set of engineering managers; build their capacity to run their teams independently.
• Drive org design decisions: team scope, composition, sequencing of team splits, and addition of new management capacity as the org grows.
• Balance engineering capacity across teams; make explicit prioritization calls when demand exceeds supply.
• Own the technical roadmap in partnership with the product manager, who owns the product and feature roadmap.
• Engage at the architecture level with senior ICs—reviewing designs, providing guidance, and ensuring technical coherence across the platform.
• Supervise hiring across engineering teams: set the bar, calibrate across managers, and close strong candidates.
• Partner with the VP of Engineering on org strategy, headcount planning, and cross-product engineering initiatives.
• Communicate clearly to senior leadership on progress, risks, and tradeoffs across the roadmap.
• Ensure engineering practices—security, quality, reliability, and operational discipline—meet the standards required for mission-critical deployments.

WHO YOU ARE

• You lead through managers: you develop them, hold them accountable, and build the systems that let them succeed independently.
• You have the technical depth to engage meaningfully on architecture and design with senior ICs—you don't need to write the code, but you need to understand it.
• You think at the org level: headcount, team structure, scope boundaries, and sequencing are as natural to you as roadmap and delivery.
• You execute with rigor and communicate with clarity—up to VP and across to peers, without losing the technical truth.
• You thrive in hybrid deployment environments: you understand the operational complexity of software that lives both in cloud and on customer-controlled infrastructure.
• You hold a high bar and create the conditions for others to meet it—through clarity, coaching, and accountability.
• You bring calm, structured decision-making to ambiguous, fast-moving problem spaces.

MUST HAVE

• You have 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• You have 5+ years of engineering management experience, including at least 3 years managing other engineering managers.