Director, Software Engineering

Software EngineeringSanta Barbara,CaliforniaSan Diego,CaliforniaDallas,TexasRemote - Atlanta,GARemote - Chicago,ILRemote - San Francisco,CARemote - Washington DC,United StatesRemote - Denver,CO We’re more than just a software company – we’re pioneers in cloud and AI who deliver magical experiences that make our customers’ lives easier.

We’re revolutionizing how people do business in the real estate industry, and we want your ideas, enthusiasm, and passion to help us keep innovating.

The Director of Engineering, Developer Productivity will manage and continue to grow a world class platform engineering organization for our award winning products.

You will drive the successful delivery of the internal developer platform (IDP) and developer tools while contributing to the overarching engineering strategy, architecture, and roadmap.

This opportunity is ideal for an engineering leader who specializes in Platform Engineering and Developer Experience (DevEx). You will oversee the network of services—including a unified deployment engine, a front end service layer, and a comprehensive CI/automation suite—ensuring that every engineer in our organization can ship code that is secure, compliant, and high quality at high velocity.

We are looking for a forward thinking leader who can also harness the power of today’s AI advancements to revolutionize the SDLC, automating code reviews, test generation, and deployment health checks at scale.

Platform Strategy & Technical Architecture Set the technical direction for the Internal Developer Platform, ensuring seamless "Golden Paths" for developers across distributed microservices.

Oversee the engineering of the Front End Service Layer (FSL), ensuring a unified, high performance UI framework and component library that bridges the gap between design and production.

Build automated Deployment and Delivery frameworks that enable high confidence releases through canary deployments, blue green shifts, and automated rollbacks.

Partner with InfoSec and SRE to ensure all delivery pipelines adhere to SOC 2, secure supply chain standards (SLSA), and automated vulnerability scanning.

Advocate for a SMART codebase (Simple, Maintainable, Agile, Refactored, and Tested) to deliver a SAFE platform (Secure, Available, Fast, and Easy). Drive the strategy for integrating AI/ML models into the developer workflow to identify flaky tests, suggest code optimizations, and automate complex infrastructure as code (IaC) migrations that manual efforts miss.

Recruit, screen, and close high caliber engineering talent, scaling three distinct current teams: Deployment/Delivery, Front End Service Layer, and CI/Dev Tooling.

and a potential future backend development team.

Lead, coach, and support a team of passionate platform engineers, creating an environment of creativity and speed while maintaining the discipline required for foundational infrastructure.

Instill a sense of Product Ownership over the developer experience, ensuring the team treats internal developers as Tier 1 customers.

Build trusting relationships with Product Management and SRE teams to align platform resources with company strategy, balancing immediate developer needs with long term architectural investments.

D.

in Computer Science or related technical discipline.

8+ years of hands on software development experience building enterprise SaaS or cloud based platforms.

5+ years of demonstrated success hiring, managing, and retaining world class engineering teams.

Proven track record leading platform or "Engineering Excellence" teams during a transition to hyper growth.

Experience building proprietary CI/CD platforms (e.g., Strong grasp of frontend architecture, design system integration, and the challenges of scaling front end service layers.

Demonstrated ability to design "self healing" pipelines that maintain 99.999% platform availability for the engineering org.

Experience partnering with Data Science to operationalize AI assisted engineering tools (LLM based coding assistants, automated observability) within the internal toolchain.

Hands on experience with all layers of the stack from infrastructure, persistence, backend, frontend, observability, etc for products at scale.

Recent experience using Agile methodologies and a deep understanding of Release Management workflows.

Customer Obsessed Treat engineers as customers.

Be the voice of engineering.

Advocate for platform/productivity investments with clear ROI, tying improvements to delivery speed, quality, and operational excellence.

Run tight feedback loops, publish what you heard, what you shipped, and what’s next—so teams see their input reflected in outcomes.

The base salary that we reasonably expect to pay for this role is $216,300-$270,000 plus equity and an annual incentive bonus.

The base pay range indicated here does not include any additional benefits or bonuses/commissions that you may be eligible for based on your role and/or employment type.

Regular full time employees are eligible for benefits - see here.

Our innovative platform and trusted partnership enable our customers to connect communities, increase operational efficiency, and grow their business.

Grow We enable a culture of high performance, where delivering results is recognized by opportunities for growth and compelling total rewards.

Impact We are creating a world where living in, investing in, managing, and supporting communities feels magical and effortless, freeing people to thrive.

We learn as much from each other as we do our customers and our communities.

Connect We excel at hybrid work by fostering an environment that feels flexible, personal and connected, no matter where we are.

At AppFolio, we value diversity in backgrounds and perspectives and depend on it to drive our innovative culture.

This means that no matter what race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identification, national origin, age, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, or veteran status, you’re always welcome at AppFolio.

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