| Detail | For this role |
|---|---|
| Department | Information Technology |
| Level | Senior management |
| Reports to | Vice President Engineering |
| Direct reports | Engineering Manager, Principal Engineer, Technical Project Manager |
| Experience | 12 to 16 years in software development, with 5 or more years managing engineering managers |
Director of Engineering job description template
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Job title: Director of Engineering
Department: Information Technology
Reports to: Vice President Engineering
Location: [City], [office, branch or site]
About the role
A Director of Engineering leads several engineering teams, usually through three to six engineering managers, for one product line or business unit. They turn the product roadmap into staffed and sequenced engineering plans, own the headcount and budget for their group, and step in when delivery, quality or morale slips. In Indian product companies and large startups the role sits below the VP Engineering. A good director keeps releases predictable, grows managers from within and settles cross-team conflicts before they reach leadership.
Key responsibilities
- Convert the half-yearly product roadmap into an engineering plan with team ownership, sequencing, dependencies and realistic delivery dates.
- Plan headcount for the group, get positions approved, and chair final interviews for engineering managers and senior engineers.
- Run a fortnightly delivery review with each engineering manager covering milestones, risks, blocked dependencies and quality signals.
- Coach engineering managers in regular one-on-ones, and step in on hard people cases such as performance improvement plans and flight risks.
- Own the group's operating budget, including cloud spend, tool licences and contractor costs, and explain variances to finance each quarter.
- Settle ownership disputes between teams and decide who builds shared components when two roadmaps depend on the same service.
- Review incident postmortems for the group and make sure repeat causes are funded as engineering work instead of lingering as action items.
- Set engineering practices for the group, such as code review rules, on-call rotas and release cadence, within company standards.
- Calibrate performance ratings and promotion cases across teams so standards stay consistent between managers.
- Represent engineering in business reviews with product, sales and customer success heads, and give honest estimates of what can ship.
Requirements
- B.E. or B.Tech in Computer Science or a related branch, or MCA
- A management programme from an IIM or a similar institute is an advantage
- 12 to 16 years in software development, with 5 or more years managing engineering managers
KRAs and KPIs for a Director of Engineering
Key result areas for the appraisal form, each with a KPI you can measure every month or quarter.
| Key result area | How to measure it |
|---|---|
| Roadmap delivery | At least 80 percent of committed quarterly roadmap items shipped in the quarter, with slips flagged a month ahead |
| Engineering quality | Severity 1 incidents from the group's releases falling quarter on quarter, and postmortem actions closed within 30 days |
| Team retention | Regretted attrition in the group below the company target for the year |
| Hiring | Approved positions filled within 90 days of approval, with offer acceptance tracked for each role |
| Budget | Group spend on people, cloud and tools within the approved annual budget |
| Manager development | Every engineering manager has a written growth plan reviewed twice a year |
Skills and tools
Tools used day to day: Jira, Confluence, GitHub or GitLab, Grafana or Datadog dashboards, Google Sheets or Excel for headcount plans, Slack or Microsoft Teams.
Reporting line and career path
Next roles: Vice President Engineering, Head of Engineering, Chief Technology Officer
Interview questions for a Director of Engineering
- Two of your teams both claim ownership of the payments service. How do you settle it?
- Walk me through how you plan engineering headcount for the next financial year.
- One of your engineering managers has missed commitments for two quarters in a row. What do you do?
- How do you decide how much capacity goes to tech debt versus roadmap features?
- Describe a release that failed badly. What changed in your group afterwards?
- How do you keep promotion decisions fair across managers who rate differently?
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What does a director of engineering do?
A director of engineering runs a group of engineering teams through their managers. They plan headcount and budget, turn the product roadmap into delivery plans, handle dependencies and escalations between teams, coach engineering managers and keep quality and delivery predictable. They write far less code than a principal engineer and spend most of their time on people, planning and decisions.
What is the difference between a director of engineering and an engineering manager?
An engineering manager leads one team of engineers directly and owns its sprint delivery and people. A director of engineering leads several such managers, controls a larger budget and headcount, sets practices for the whole group and decides trade-offs between teams. In most companies the director sits one level below the VP Engineering.
Who does a director of engineering report to?
In most Indian product companies a director of engineering reports to the VP Engineering. In smaller startups without a VP layer, the director may report directly to the CTO or to the co-founder who runs technology, and may also cover some duties of a head of engineering.