Director of Engineering, Intelligent Messaging

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 $250,000 - $350,000 annually + equity + benefits
• Our salary ranges are determined by role, level and location

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