Director of Engineering

Director Of Engineering

Every day, pet parents walk out of a vet's office having just said no to a treatment their pet needed, not because they don't love their pet, but because they couldn't afford care. Pawlicy Advisor exists to eliminate this problem. Pawlicy Advisor is a venture-backed startup building the infrastructure that connects pet parents to the right financial protection for their pets, starting with the most trusted pet insurance marketplace in the US, distributed through thousands of veterinary practices nationwide. Pawlicy Advisor has delivered over 1 million unique quotes, has raised $19M+, has found product-market fit, and is now scaling. Pawlicy Advisor is hiring a Director of Engineering to lead the engineering organization and own how it builds: technical strategy, architecture, quality, security, delivery, and the growth of the engineering team. This is a hands-on role at a profitable business where you will set the bar for how the team builds, including how the company uses AI tools. The role reports directly to the Chief Product Officer and leads an outstanding team of engineers working alongside a senior product manager, senior product designer, and data analyst.

Technical Leadership

• Key architectural decisions: major tech choices, build vs buy, scalability of the site, and carrier integrations.
• Security reviews of product and infrastructure changes, plus carrier and vendor security questionnaires and audits.
• Serving as the technical point of contact and leader with key partners.
• Release management and deployment: CI/CD, release cadence, rollbacks, and production stability.
• Prioritizing technical debt and refactoring, balanced against feature velocity.
• QA and testing processes: automated coverage, manual QA, and quality standards before release.

Engineering Management

• On-call management: rotation, escalation paths, incident response, and postmortems.
• Career development of engineers: 1:1s, performance feedback, and keeping the team unblocked.
• Building the team: hiring and onboarding new engineers as the company grows.

Vendor and AI Management

• Approval of new software used internally, evaluated on cost, security, and fit, including renewals and replacements.
• Engineering tooling and infrastructure spend: cloud costs, licenses, and consolidation opportunities.
• Owning and evolving Pawlicy's AI policy and best practices. Lead the company's rollout and expansion of AI usage while optimizing cost.

Where You Partner

• OKRs: creation and ownership of key business goals and objectives
• Product: sprint priorities, tech debt vs feature velocity tradeoffs, and delivery timelines with the senior product manager and the Chief Product Officer.
• Design: front end quality and design QA with the senior product designer.
• Partnerships and legal: carrier and vendor security questionnaires, audits, and integration requirements.
• Data and analytics: tooling and reliable data flow across product systems

What Success Looks Like

First 90 days

• Delivery is stable and predictable: releases ship on a defined cadence, and incidents have owners, escalation paths, and postmortems.
• Full command of the architecture: the site, quote engine, and carrier integrations, with a prioritized view of technical debt and risk.
• 1:1s and career development running for every engineer.
• A first version of Pawlicy's AI development policy and best practices in place.

First 12 months

• A technical roadmap has been executed with security investments sequenced against business priorities.
• Delivery measurably improved: velocity, quality, and production stability all trend the right way.
• Carrier and vendor security reviews handled end to end without external help.
• Engineers are growing against clear development plans, and the team is confident in the technical bar you set.
• AI-assisted development is ingrained in the culture and adopted with measured results.