Founding Director, Digital Engineering

Job Description

FOUNDING DIRECTOR, DIGITAL ENGINEERING

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Thresh Consulting — Strategy in Action for the AI Era

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Salary: $250,000–$295,000 + up to 30% performance-based bonus and equity potential

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Location: Hybrid with client travel (NYC, Chicago or Denver preferred)

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ABOUT THRESH

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Thresh Consulting is a modern digital consulting firm built for the AI era—where strategy, execution, and craft come together to deliver real outcomes with speed. Our specialty is helping organizations design, build, and scale digital products that create exceptional customer experiences and drive measurable value.

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ROLE OVERVIEW

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This role will lead Thresh's rapidly growing Digital Engineering practice, owning delivery quality across every engagement, driving talent strategy and technical hiring, and pushing innovation across AI-enabled digital engineering that keeps Thresh ahead of the market.

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You will define how the Digital Engineering practice embraces agentic AI, from single-agent loops to multi-agent orchestration graphs, to radically compress the distance between spec and shipped code, raising the bar on both engineering quality and the speed from concept to production.

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You'll work closely with clients, leading technical strategy and full-stack delivery teams as the hands-on engineering leader for Thresh. You'll use tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and others to scaffold applications and prototype complex features in real time, showing the team and clients what modern engineering velocity looks like.

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This is a leadership-team seat, not simply an engineering lead role. We are looking for a rare combination: a deeply technical engineer and a polished, credible communicator. Someone equally comfortable diving into a complex architecture challenge and standing in front of a client CTO. You will own outcomes, and share in the upside that comes with them.

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WHAT YOU’LL DO

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PRACTICE LEADERSHIP & GROWTH

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• Develop new engineering offerings and points of view (e.g., AI-native delivery cycles, spec-driven development) that differentiate Thresh in the market.
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• Partner with the founders on demand planning, staffing, and the practice's contribution to firm growth.
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• Set the technical culture and quality bar for the practice, and represent Digital Engineering in firm-level decisions.
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• Sit on the firm's leadership team, contributing to firm strategy beyond engineering and carrying accountability for the practice as a business line, not just a delivery function.
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AI-NATIVE DEVELOPMENT & PROTOTYPING

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• Build functional prototypes and MVPs in hours, not weeks, using tools like Cursor and Claude Code — whether live in client discovery sessions to unblock decision-making, or internally to validate concepts and show the team what modern engineering velocity looks like.
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• Establish spec-driven development as the default: typed contracts, version-controlled alongside code, written so an agent can implement against them and an experienced engineer can verify correctness against the spec rather than the diff.
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• Stand up evaluation harnesses and quality gates for AI-generated code so velocity never outruns correctness — tests, evals, and review patterns that make speed safe.
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• Design agentic workflows and orchestration, including MCP-based tool and context integration, so AI tooling compounds across the team rather than forking it.
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• Make build-vs-buy-vs-agent architecture calls and define Thresh's AI-assisted development stack, so every engineer spends time on business logic and innovation rather than boilerplate and repetitive patterns.
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TECHNICAL STRATEGY & ARCHITECTURE

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• Define the technical north star for client engagements, balancing speed, quality, scale, security, and maintainability in every framework and architecture decision.
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• Architect enterprise-grade, full-stack applications — our default greenfield stack is Next.js + TypeScript on the front-end and Node, Go, or Python on the server, with the AI workflow layer built around the Anthropic and OpenAI SDKs — while remaining pragmatic and working in the client's existing stack for brownfield work, and staying ahead of the curve on emerging frameworks and AI-assisted development practices.
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• Own reliability, accessibility, and compliance from day one — Core Web Vitals, error budgets, accessibility baselines, and incident readiness — and engineer to the security posture each engagement requires (e.g., SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI), working directly with the client's security team.
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• Bridge the gap between Design and Engineering by leveraging AI to translate Figma designs into production-ready component code via token-driven, system-aware pipelines.
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ENGINEERING LEADERSHIP

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• Lead, develop, and grow the Digital Engineering team — earning trust with engineers and raising the bar.
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• Coach your team on the fast-evolving AI-native delivery toolchain — coding agents, evals, orchestration, and whatever comes next — ensuring the team compounds velocity, quality, and creative problem-solving as the landscape shifts.
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• Conduct code reviews focused on architecture, logic, and patterns — not syntax checks that AI can handle.
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• Create a culture of continuous learning where engineers are always exploring new tools, techniques, and ways to deliver value faster.
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• Balance team capacity across multiple client engagements, ensuring quality and sustainability even when demand is high.
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CLIENT ENGAGEMENT & BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

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• Serve as Thresh's senior technical voice with client engineering leadership, setting the tone for exceptional delivery standards.
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• Own the technical relationship with C-suite and senior client stakeholders, presenting strategy and roadmaps as a trusted advisor.
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• Drive scoping, estimation, and proposal development for new engagements, shaping deal structure and technical approach before a contract is signed.
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• Design and lead clean handoffs to in-house client teams, ensuring Thresh's technical credibility outlasts any single engagement.
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WHAT YOU BRING

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• 10-15+ years of professional software engineering experience with deep expertise across the modern full-stack, including architecting complex, scalable systems and delivering production-ready software under tight timelines.
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• Expertise in AI coding assistants: you should be a power user of Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot or similar tools , capable of demonstrating how these tools transform the development lifecycle, including spec-driven development, evals for AI-generated code, and agent orchestration in production.
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• 5-8+ years of engineering management experience, comfortable balancing strategic leadership with tactical execution: zooming out to set direction, then zooming in to unblock an engineer.
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• Polished, credible communicator, equally comfortable diving into a complex architecture problem with engineers and presenting strategy to a client CTO or executive audience.
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• Intellectual curiosity and a bias toward experimentation, always exploring what's possible with new tools and techniques, not limited to AI.
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• Practice-building or offering-development experience with a business development mindset: you've developed a team or capability as a business, not just delivered projects within one.
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• Consulting or client-facing delivery experience is strongly preferred, with a track record of owning commercial outcomes on the engagements you lead, protecting margin and growing account value, not just delivering to spec.
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WHY THRESH

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• Competitive compensation and performance bonus eligibility.
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• Healthcare benefits and 401(k) with company match.
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• Opportunity to work on modern, high-impact products utilizing cutting-edge AI-assisted development tools.
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• A culture built on clarity, craft, and teamwork, with a commitment to human competency amplified by AI tools.
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• Lean, partner-led teams that ship fast: your work reaches production, not slideware
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• A seat at the leadership table and a compensation structure built to reward high performers.
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