Director, Software Engineering

Description

Hi, We’re AppFolio

We’re innovators, changemakers, and collaborators. We’re more than just a software company – we’re pioneers in cloud and AI who deliver magical experiences that make our customers’ lives easier. We’re revolutionizing how people do business in the real estate industry, and we want your ideas, enthusiasm, and passion to help us keep innovating.

The Director of Engineering, Developer Productivity will manage and continue to grow a world‑class platform engineering organization for our award‑winning products. You will drive the successful delivery of the internal developer platform (IDP) and developer tools while contributing to the overarching engineering strategy, architecture, and roadmap.

This opportunity is ideal for an engineering leader who specializes in Platform Engineering and Developer Experience (DevEx). You won’t just be maintaining legacy scripts; you will lead the teams responsible for architecting and scaling our proprietary internal development ecosystem. You will oversee the network of services—including a unified deployment engine, a front‑end service layer, and a comprehensive CI/automation suite—ensuring that every engineer in our organization can ship code that is secure, compliant, and high‑quality at high velocity. We are looking for a forward‑thinking leader who can also harness the power of today’s AI advancements to revolutionize the SDLC, automating code reviews, test generation, and deployment health checks at scale.

The location for the position is Santa Barbara, CA or San Diego.

Your Impact

Platform Strategy & Technical Architecture

• Set the technical direction for the Internal Developer Platform, ensuring seamless "Golden Paths" for developers across distributed microservices.
• Oversee the engineering of the Front‑End Service Layer (FSL), ensuring a unified, high‑performance UI framework and component library that bridges the gap between design and production.
• Act as the primary technical counterpart for SRE and Security teams, translating reliability and compliance requirements into automated, invisible guardrails within the developer workflow.

Operational Excellence, CI/CD & Test Automation

• Build automated Deployment and Delivery frameworks that enable high‑confidence releases through canary deployments, blue‑green shifts, and automated rollbacks.
• Partner with InfoSec and SRE to ensure all delivery pipelines adhere to SOC 2, secure supply chain standards (SLSA), and automated vulnerability scanning.
• Advocate for a SMART codebase (Simple, Maintainable, Agile, Refactored, and Tested) to deliver a SAFE platform (Secure, Available, Fast, and Easy).
• Drive the strategy for integrating AI/ML models into the developer workflow to identify flaky tests, suggest code optimizations, and automate complex infrastructure‑as‑code (IaC) migrations that manual efforts miss.

Team Leadership & Talent Development

• Recruit, screen, and close high‑caliber engineering talent, scaling three distinct current teams: Deployment/Delivery, Front‑End Service Layer, and CI/Dev Tooling, and a potential future backend development team.
• Lead, coach, and support a team of passionate platform engineers, creating an environment of creativity and speed while maintaining the discipline required for foundational infrastructure.
• Instill a sense of Product Ownership over the developer experience, ensuring the team treats internal developers as Tier‑1 customers.

Strategic Collaboration & Resource Management

• Build trusting relationships with Product Management and SRE teams to align platform resources with company strategy, balancing immediate developer needs with long‑term architectural investments.
• Experience with GetDX, JellyFish, or other developer metrics used to continuously improve the developer experience and productivity.

Must Haves

Experience & Education

• BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related technical discipline.
• 8+ years of hands‑on software development experience building enterprise SaaS or cloud‑based platforms.
• 5+ years of demonstrated success hiring, managing, and retaining world‑class engineering teams.
• Proven track record leading platform or "Engineering Excellence" teams during a transition to hyper‑growth.

Platform & Developer Domain Expertise

• Experience building proprietary CI/CD platforms (e.g., ArgoCD, or custom GitHub Actions orchestration) and internal developer portals (e.g., Backstage).
• Deep understanding of Build Systems (e.g. Bazel) and Test Automation strategies for large‑scale distributed systems.
• Working knowledge of infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform) and containerized workflows.

Technical Architecture & Systems Design

• Strong grasp of frontend architecture, design system integration, and the challenges of scaling front‑end service layers.
• Demonstrated ability to design "self‑healing" pipelines that maintain 99.999% platform availability for the engineering org.
• Experience partnering with Data Science to operationalize AI‑assisted engineering tools (LLM‑based coding assistants, automated observability) within the internal toolchain.
• Diverse technical background with in depth experience across a range of architectures and technologies. Hands‑on experience with all layers of the stack from infrastructure, persistence, backend, frontend, observability, etc for products at scale.

Leadership & Methodology

• Recent experience using Agile methodologies and a deep understanding of Release Management workflows.
• Exceptional interpersonal skills with a proven ability to build productive cross‑departmental relationships (SRE, Security, Product).

Customer Obsessed

• Treat engineers as customers. Build a deep understanding of developer pain points through continuous listening (interviews, shadowing, telemetry) and translate that into a prioritized roadmap.
• Start from the developer experience and work backwards. Define success in terms of measurable improvements to engineer flow, reliability, and time‑to‑value.
• Be the voice of engineering. Advocate for platform/productivity investments with clear ROI, tying improvements to delivery speed, quality, and operational excellence.
• Build trust through responsiveness. Run tight feedback loops, publish what you heard, what you shipped, and what’s next—so teams see their input reflected in outcomes.
• Reduce toil relentlessly. Identify repetitive work and eliminate it via tooling, automation, paved roads, and self‑service.

Compensation & Benefits

The base salary that we reasonably expect to pay for this role is $216,300-$270,000 plus equity and an annual incentive bonus.

The actual base salary for this role will be determined by a variety of factors, including but not limited to: the candidate’s skills, education, experience, etc.

Please note that base pay is one important aspect of a compelling Total Rewards package. The base pay range indicated here does not include any additional benefits or bonuses/commissions that you may be eligible for based on your role and/or employment type.

Regular full‑time employees are eligible for benefits - see here.

About AppFolio

AppFolio is the technology leader powering the future of the real estate industry. Our innovative platform and trusted partnership enable our customers to connect communities, increase operational efficiency, and grow their business. For more information about AppFolio, visit appfolio.com.

Why AppFolio

Grow | We enable a culture of high performance, where delivering results is recognized by opportunities for growth and compelling total rewards. Our challenging and meaningful work drive the growth of our business, and ourselves.

Learn | We partner with you to realize your potential by investing in you from the start. We're cultivating a team of big thinkers through coaching and mentorship with our best‑in‑class leaders, and giving you the time and tools to develop your skills.

Impact | We are creating a world where living in, investing in, managing, and supporting communities feels magical and effortless, freeing people to thrive. We do this by innovating with purpose while cultivating a culture of impact. We learn as much from each other as we do our customers and our communities.

Connect | We excel at hybrid work by fostering an environment that feels flexible, personal and connected, no matter where we are. We create space to fuel innovation and collaboration, and we come together to celebrate, connect, and succeed.

Paddle as One.

Learn more at appfolio.com/company/careers

Statement of Equal Opportunity

At AppFolio, we value diversity in backgrounds and perspectives and depend on it to drive our innovative culture. That’s why we’re a proud Equal Opportunity Employer, and we believe that our products, our teams, and our business are stronger because of it. This means that no matter what race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identification, national origin, age, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, or veteran status, you’re always welcome at AppFolio.