Director of Engineering

Responsibilities

• Own engineering organization structure, staffing strategy, and operating model for the cash delivery platform
• Define multi-year technical strategy, including build vs. buy decisions and architectural transitions
• Protect and scale engineering culture through rapid growth and high talent density
• Own engineering delivery, platform reliability, and roadmap trade-offs with the Platform Product Lead
• Drive operational excellence including on-call, incident response, code quality, and deployment practices
• Represent engineering at senior leadership and translate technical realities into business decisions
• Coach and develop engineers through 1:1s, feedback, career planning, and performance management
• Set technical quality bar by reviewing designs and helping the team make sound trade-offs

Requirements

• 5+ years managing engineers, including leading multiple teams through full delivery cycles
• 10+ years building production software with strong backend, database, cloud, and API experience
• Demonstrated ability to recruit, coach, develop, and retain engineers during high-growth periods
• Track record building strong engineering culture with candid debate and deep product ownership
• Strong technical judgment and ability to pressure-test architecture decisions
• Experience partnering with non-technical stakeholders and building product-development fluency
• Exceptional alignment with GiveDirectly values and core competencies
• English language fluency required
• Must overlap East Africa Time by at least 3 hours regularly
• Ability to travel 3-4 times per year to countries of operation

About the Company

GiveDirectly delivers cash directly to people living in poverty across 15 countries. Since 2011, the organization has transferred more than $1 billion to over 2 million recipients, focusing on scalable, cost-effective, and dignified aid backed by rigorous research.