Director, Engineering, Grid Platform – Reporting Services

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Washington.

📋 Description

• Take ownership of the engineering vision, charter, and objectives for the Views Platform and Reporting pillar, collaborating with your product counterpart to jointly steer roadmap priorities across the Grid Service, Reports Engine, Dynamic Views, Grid Orchestration layer, and user-facing reporting interfaces.

• Guide 3-4 teams through a layer of Engineering Managers and Principal Engineers, ensuring accountability for delivery, reliability, and team well-being while actively nurturing their development as leaders.

• Propel the architectural advancement of the core platform, balancing commitments to five-nines availability with the scalability investments necessary for supporting Smartsheet's enterprise growth trajectory.

• Manage the complete reporting stack: encompassing both the backend infrastructure and the front-end reporting views and interfaces that enterprise customers rely on for project and portfolio management.

• Establish and monitor engineering and business outcomes for the pillar, including SLO/SLA targets and production reliability indicators. Recognize systematic production challenges and create pillar-level mechanisms to preemptively address them before they escalate into customer issues.

• Initiate and oversee cross-team technical initiatives that span multiple upstream dependencies and internal consumers, resolving architectural conflicts and making decisive choices that position the platform for future scalability.

• Set and uphold high standards across code quality, test coverage, performance, security, and operational excellence, and develop the mechanisms to maintain these standards at the pillar level.

• Strategically consider customer outcomes, guiding managers and principal engineers to bridge existing gaps and anticipate future enterprise requirements. Act as a technical advisor representing the pillar in customer discussions.

• Clearly communicate platform complexity to a diverse range of audiences, from your engineering organization to executive leadership. Generate clear written documents for strategic vision, long-term plans, and pillar reviews that align teams and guide decisions.

• Champion AI adoption throughout the pillar, holding leaders accountable for AI productivity, supporting AI-first design choices, and ensuring alignment with the cross-product AI strategy.

• Lead strategic hiring initiatives for the pillar, exemplifying a high standard for talent and fostering an inclusive culture that develops and retains exceptional engineering managers and principal engineers.

⛳️ Requirements

• 11+ years of experience in software engineering and system architecture, with substantial expertise in distributed systems and high-availability platform infrastructure.

• 5+ years of engineering leadership experience with a proven history of guiding multiple layers of management across a complex technical and product charter, simultaneously overseeing both platform infrastructure and user-facing product surfaces.

• A successful track record of owning and operating tier 0 or mission-critical services with five-nines availability, along with the hands-on technical credibility with engineers that comes from in-depth knowledge of the work.

• Proven ability to bridge technical complexity and business outcomes, making infrastructure decisions comprehensible to executives and product strategies understandable to engineers.

• A demonstrated commitment to customer empathy in practice: leveraging customer context to prioritize platform investments and user-facing roadmaps in ways that yield measurable business outcomes.

• Experience in leading full-stack engineering teams, with deep knowledge of backend and sufficient front-end fluency to maintain high standards across the entire stack.

• Hands-on experience in designing or evolving distributed architectures under scaling constraints, including caching strategies, data consistency trade-offs, and performance optimization at volume.

• Experience in building and scaling cloud-native services on AWS, with proficiency in observability tools, alerting, and SLO/SLA management at scale.

• Proven experience in leading cross-functional technical programs amid significant ambiguity and inter-team dependencies; delivering results in challenging circumstances.

• Strong foundational knowledge in computer science: data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, object-oriented design, and familiarity with Agile/Scrum and DevOps/CI/CD methodologies.

• Effective and proactive communication (both written and verbal) with technical and non-technical stakeholders, including executive leadership.

• A BS or MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Legally authorized to work in the U.S. on an ongoing basis.

🏝️ Benefits

• Employer-subsidized medical, vision, and dental coverage for full-time employees.

• 401k Match to assist you in saving for your future (50% of your contribution up to the first 6% of your eligible pay).

• Monthly stipend to enhance your work and productivity.

• Flexible Time Away Program, along with Sick Time Off.

• US employees are automatically enrolled in Smartsheet-sponsored life insurance, short-term, and long-term disability plans.

• US employees receive 12 paid holidays each year.

• Up to 24 weeks of Parental Leave.

• A personal paid Volunteer Day to support our community.

• Opportunities for professional growth and development, including access to Udemy online courses.

• Company-funded perks, including a counseling membership, local retail discounts, and your personal Smartsheet account.

• Teleworking options from any registered location in the U.S. (role-specific).