Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Director, Engineering role sits at the intersection of core SaaS infrastructure and customer-facing product capability, focused on AI-powered search and discovery. In the SaaS ecosystem, search relevance, latency, and reliability are not background concerns; they directly shape activation, retention, and expansion for downstream products. Leading this area signals a mandate to treat platform performance and applied ML as first-class product levers, not just engineering outputs.
For a long-term SaaS engineering career, the position offers a clear path into operating at the level where strategy becomes durable systems, roadmaps, and execution rhythms. Managing through Engineering Managers while owning delivery and operational excellence builds portable leadership skills that translate across SaaS categories, especially where multi-tenant scale, APIs, and uptime expectations define the business. The emphasis on evaluating emerging AI technologies also reflects a broader shift in SaaS engineering toward productivity and capability gains driven by applied AI.
This role best fits an engineering leader who enjoys aligning multiple teams around shared outcomes, partnering closely with Product and Design, and balancing near-term delivery with foundational technical decisions. It will appeal to someone who prefers structured planning cycles, high stakeholder density, and accountability for both system health and product impact.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the Team
Algolia’s Engineering team builds the core infrastructure and product features that power real-time search and discovery for thousands of customers around the world. This includes backend services, frontend components, site reliability, and ML-powered capabilities. The team is distributed, collaborative, and committed to technical excellence and continuous learning.
As an Engineering Director, you will lead multiple teams or a critical product area, working closely with Engineering Managers, Product, and Design to deliver scalable, reliable, and high-impact solutions. You will play a key role in translating company strategy into execution, while building strong, autonomous teams and fostering engineering excellence.
Your Role Will Consist Of:
- Leading a group of engineering teams (via Engineering Managers and Senior ICs), ensuring alignment with product and company priorities
- Demonstrates strong AI leadership within the engineering organization by fostering a culture of continuous improvement and proactively evaluating and applying emerging AI technologies to enhance productivity, efficiency, and organizational performance across the broader technology function.
- Owning delivery, execution, and operational excellence for a defined product or platform area
- Partnering closely with Product, Design, and cross-functional stakeholders to shape roadmaps and ensure successful delivery of customer value
- Driving engineering best practices across system design, scalability, reliability, and performance
- Being a member of Algolia’s senior technology leadership team, with significant contributions to engineering excellence and the high performance of the global technology organization, extending beyond the immediate area of responsibility.
- Supporting and coaching Engineering Managers, helping them grow as leaders and build high-performing teams
- Contributing to organizational planning, including headcount, team structure, and quarterly/annual planning cycles
- Ensuring a strong culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement within your organization
- Acting as a bridge between strategy and execution, translating high-level goals into clear team-level priorities
- Serves as a trusted advisor to the CTO and SVP Engineering, providing strategic guidance on engineering leadership, organizational effectiveness, and cross-functional management initiatives across the technology organization.
You Might Be a Fit If You Have:
- 8–12+ years of engineering experience, including 3–5+ years managing multiple teams or managing through managers
- Proven experience delivering complex, cross-functional projects in a fast-paced, high-growth environment
- Strong technical background with experience in distributed systems, APIs, and scalable infrastructure
- Demonstrated ability to lead through others, empowering managers and senior engineers
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to align diverse stakeholders and drive clarity
- Experience operating in distributed or global engineering environments
Nice to Have:
- Experience in developer tools, infrastructure, or data platforms
- Familiarity with product-led growth (PLG) environments
- Exposure to AI/ML-powered products or platforms
