Director of Software Engineering

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 in a technical leadership or staff-level individual contributor role
• Demonstrated track record building and shipping reliable production systems at scale. You have owned things that could not go down
• Deep technical credibility. Engineers on your teams have respected your judgment and not just your title
• Experience with SRE principles, reliability engineering, or large-scale automation. You have reduced toil systematically and not just complained about it
• Strong foundation in Python, distributed systems, data platforms, and cloud infrastructure
• Experience hiring and developing engineers. You know what great looks like and how to find it
• The communication and influence skills to drive technical decisions across teams you do not directly control
• (Desirable) Experience applying AI/ML or advanced analytics to operational or monitoring problems
• (Desirable) Experience writing performance software in Rust
• (Desirable) Background in space systems, aerospace, or highly constrained real‑time environments
• (Desirable) Experience building data lakes, telemetry platforms, or observability infrastructure at scale
• (Desirable) A history of leading teams through technical transformations and not just maintaining the status quo

What the job involves

• We need a director who writes code, reviews architecture, challenges technical decisions, and earns the team's respect through demonstrated craft and not just tenure or title
• Define and own the technical roadmap for autonomous constellation operations
• Set the architectural direction for the data platform, reliability systems, and automation infrastructure
• Stay hands‑on: review code, prototype solutions, and get into the details when it matters
• Establish engineering standards across code quality, system design, testing, and observability, and hold the team to them
• Be the person engineers come to when the problem is genuinely hard
• Recruit, develop, and retain a team of 6 to 10 world‑class reliability and platform engineers
• Set the pace, tone, and ambition for the team and make being on it feel like a privilege
• Create an environment where engineers grow fast, own their work, and ship things they are proud of
• Identify gaps and level up engineers through mentorship and not just management
• Lead the shift from manual, operator‑driven processes to fully automated and self‑healing operations
• Define and drive toward SLOs, error budgets, and reliability targets for the constellation
• Partner with satellite operations and mission teams to translate pain into software solutions
• Be the technical voice of the team in company‑wide conversations about architecture, infrastructure, and platform strategy
• Influence how Spire thinks about automation, data, and AI/ML across the broader engineering organization