Director, Engineering

Attentive® is the AI marketing platform for 1:1 personalization redefining the way brands and people connect. We’re the only marketing platform that combines powerful technology with human expertise to build authentic customer relationships. By unifying SMS, RCS, email, and push notifications, our AI-powered personalization engine delivers bespoke experiences that drive performance, revenue, and loyalty through real-time behavioral insights. Recognized as the #1 provider in SMS Marketing by G2, Attentive partners with more than 8,000 customers across 70+ industries. Leading global brands like Crate and Barrel, Urban Outfitters, and Carter’s work with us to enable billions of interactions that power tens of billions in revenue for our customers. With a distributed global workforce and employee hubs in New York City, San Francisco, London, and Sydney, Attentive’s team has been consistently recognized for its performance and culture. We’re proud to be included in Deloitte’s Fast 500 (four years running!), LinkedIn’s Top Startups, Forbes’ Cloud 100 (five years running!), Inc.’s Best Workplaces, and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation's Corporate Equality Index!

About the Role

We’re looking for a Director of Engineering to lead our Intelligent Messaging group—one of the most critical and high-impact areas at Attentive. This team powers the systems behind billions of personalized messages (SMS, email, push) sent every month, helping the world’s leading brands connect with consumers in smarter, more meaningful ways.

At the core of this is AI, machine learning, and real-time data. This allows us to drive personalization at massive scale - turning every message into an opportunity to engage, convert, and build long-term customer relationships.

In this role, you’ll lead multiple teams and play a key role in defining how AI shapes the future of messaging at Attentive. You’ll partner closely with Product and Engineering leadership to build and scale systems that are fast, reliable, and deeply intelligent. You’ll stay close to the work - guiding architecture, unblocking complex problems, and stepping in when it matters - while also building strong teams and developing great managers.

This is a role for someone who likes to operate deep in the systems, close to the people, and aligned with the business. You’ll own the technical direction of a high-scale, high-uptime platform and help us push what’s possible as we continue to grow.

This is a hybrid role based in NYC, with occasional travel to our SF office.

What You’ll Accomplish

• You’ll own the delivery of cutting-edge, AI-powered consumer messaging experiences used by millions
• You’ll manage and evolve a multi-team organization, build on our great culture, and set a high bar for engineering excellence
• You'll oversee the technical strategy in multiple domains, supporting various layers of our messaging applications by using existing and emerging technology platforms
• You’ll accelerate our engineering velocity using cutting-edge agentic and LLM tooling, while successfully managing safety and stability
• You’lll collaborate with product, ML, design, and data science to shape the roadmap - not just execute on it

You’ll work directly with partner teams and stakeholders in the platform, go-to-market, and customer success organizations

Your Expertise

• Above all else, you are technical and love to dive deep to understand architecture, code, and infrastructure. This is the most critical attribute for success at Attentive.
• You have 10+ years of industry experience, including managing teams of 30+ engineers, and at least 2 years managing managers. From a technical perspective, you have 8+ years of experience in software engineering roles, ideally reaching staff level as an individual contributor.
• You embrace agentic workflows, and understand the benefits, complexity and risks of the fast-moving AI ecosystem
• You care about software quality and have a track record of building reliable, high-uptime systems, particularly in data-intensive environments
• You’re comfortable operating in fast-moving, high growth environments, translating business needs into the right levels of implementation

What We Use

• Our backend is Java / Kotlin / Spring Boot microservices, built with Gradle, coupled with things like DynamoDB, Aurora, AirFlow, Postgres, and Redis, hosted via AWS
• Our infrastructure runs primarily in Kubernetes hosted in AWS’s EKS, using tooling like Istio, Datadog, Terraform, CloudFlare, and Helm
• Our frontend is built with React and TypeScript, and uses best practices like GraphQL, Storybook, Radix UI, Vite, esbuild, and Playwright
• Our automation is driven by custom and open source machine learning models, industry-leading LLMs, lots of data and tech like Python, Metaflow, HuggingFace, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Pandas

You'll get competitive perks and benefits, from health & wellness to equity, to help you bring your best self to work.

For US based applicants:

• The US base salary range for this full-time position is $330,000 - $390,000 annually + equity + benefits
• Our salary ranges are determined by role, level and location

By applying for this position, your data will be processed as per Attentive's Privacy Policy.

Attentive Company Values Default to Action - Move swiftly and with purpose Be One Unstoppable Team - Rally as each other’s champions Champion the Customer - Our success is defined by our customers' success Act Like an Owner - Take responsibility for Attentive’s success Learn more about AWAKE, Attentive’s collective of employee resource groups. If you do not meet all the requirements listed here, we still encourage you to apply! No job description is perfect, and we may also have another opportunity that closely matches your skills and experience. At Attentive, we know that our Company's strength lies in the diversity of our employees. Attentive is an Equal Opportunity Employer and we welcome applicants from all backgrounds. Our policy is to provide equal employment opportunities for all employees, applicants and covered individuals regardless of protected characteristics. We prioritize and maintain a fair, inclusive and equitable workplace free from discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. Attentive is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities. If you need any assistance or reasonable accommodations, please let your recruiter know.