Technical Director

Technical Director
The Role

Mondo Robot is a mostly-human group of talented designers, product owners, and developers creating high profile, expertly-crafted digital experiences. Our center of gravity is in Colorado, but we work with clients and teammates remotely across the northern and southern hemisphere. Ideal candidates are curious, motivated, opinionated but flexible, thorough, precise, professional yet not stuffy, creative, and determined.

The Technical Director is the senior engineering leader at Mondo Robot. As part of our leadership team, you own how we build: the architecture calls, the engineering team, the technical side of our client relationships, the internal AI tooling that's changing how the agency works, and the evolution of our proprietary OS-an AI-powered system of tools, agents, workflows, and technical capabilities that enable how Mondo imagines, prototypes, builds, and delivers digital experiences. You will also own the standards that keep our work shippable and maintainable after we hand it off.

This is a hands-on leadership role at a well respected Experience & Engineering studio, newly part of a broader integrated agency network with offices in LA, Jakarta and London. You will lead a team of experienced engineers, stay close enough to the code to make good calls, and spend real time with clients and with our design, product, and strategy leads. Some weeks are mostly people and planning. Some weeks you are at the front of tech solutions for new business and clients, and others you're in a repo untangling a launch blocker.

We're looking for someone with 10+ years building for the web and at least 3 years managing engineers (not just tech-leading them), a deep foundation in composable, API-first architecture, and a track record of shipping websites, apps, APIs, and production AI systems for large brands. If you can talk to a client's CTO in the morning, review a pull request at lunch, and write a clear estimate in the afternoon, and want to be part of an ambitious and entrepreneurial growth-oriented agency, we want to hear from you.
Responsibilities
Communicate and represent engineering
• Be the tech ambassador. Translate complex technical ideas into language clients, leadership, and teammates can act on.
• Present technical roadmaps, progress, and risks to senior leadership and to clients.
• Build strong working relationships with client engineering teams, external vendors, and partners.
• Participate in agency leadership: positioning, services, and where engineering investment goes.
Set technical direction across client work
• Own architecture and stack decisions across concurrent projects for large, consumer-facing brands, with a bias toward composable, API-first (MACH) systems: headless CMS, commerce, and the integration layer that ties them together.
• Review scopes, estimates, and technical approaches before they go to clients. Be the technical voice in pitches, kickoffs, and the hard conversations when scope shifts.
• Weigh scale, security, privacy, accessibility, latency, and cost on every architecture call, and be able to explain the tradeoffs to someone who doesn't write code.
• Manage the integration of third-party and client-side systems (ERPs, CRMs, commerce platforms, cloud services) and build trust with our clients' internal engineering and IT teams.
• Deep experience on at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud), including hosting strategy, migrations, and cost management.
Lead our AI-powered engineering and development practices
• Own the vision, architecture, and roadmap for our OS, Mondo Robot's evolving AI-powered system for augmenting how our teams research, strategize, design, prototype, engineer, test, and deliver digital experiences.
• Turn emerging AI capabilities into practical, reusable tools, agents, workflows, and services that improve the way Mondo works-not technology experiments that sit on the shelf.
• Own the roadmap for the agency's internal AI tooling: Claude Skills, MCP connectors, agentic workflows, and the automation that speeds up briefs, research, time tracking, delivery, and engineering itself.
• Decide what gets built, what gets bought, what gets integrated, and what gets retired. Establish the technical, security, data, cost, and governance standards for anything that touches client or company information.
• Work closely with Creative, Product, Strategy, and Engineering leadership to identify where Robot OS can materially improve quality, speed, margin, or client outcomes.
• Productize successful capabilities so they can be reused across projects rather than rebuilt from scratch.
• Bring our OS model into pitches, prototypes, innovation engagements, and client conversations where it creates meaningful differentiation.
• Stay current on LLMs, agentic architectures, model capabilities, developer tooling, and AI infrastructure-and translate that rapidly changing landscape into practical decisions for Mondo.
• Delegate the build work where it makes sense and keep the team accountable for it. You don't have to write every tool, but you're responsible for the practice being useful, maintained, and adopted.
Build and grow the engineering team
• Manage a team of three engineers (Architect, Senior Engineer, Senior Creative Engineer). Run 1:1s on a steady cadence, write reviews, set growth plans, and make the hiring and contractor calls.
• Own the engineering ladder and use it. Every engineer should be able to say where they're headed and what gets them there.
• Be the person the team brings the tricky technical problems to, and know when to solve it with them versus stepping back to clear the barrier in front of them.
• Create an environment where people do their best work: clear expectations, honest feedback, credit handed off freely.
Run delivery and manage risk
• Keep multiple projects moving on time, within scope, and on budget, and know which one needs you this week.
• This is a hands-on role. You can jump into the code when a project needs it, and you know when to step back and look at the wider picture.
• Own code review standards, deployment practices, accessibility, performance, and security across projects. Nothing we ship should depend on one person knowing how it works.
• Spot risks early, surface them in writing, and come with a plan.
• Work closely with product, design, strategy, and account teams so technical work hits the mark.

Support the wider agency network
• Mondo Robot works alongside sister agencies Unfold and PBM. Provide technical leadership on integrated client engagements, shared infrastructure and cross-agency client work: cloud migrations, enterprise system integrations (NetSuite and similar), and hosting on shared platforms.
• Handle the technical needs that land on the most senior technical person in an entrepreneurial shop: vendor evaluations, RFP technical assessments, account and access audits.

Requirements
• 10+ years of professional experience building for the web, with at least 3 years managing engineers.
• Deep experience with composable, API-first (MACH) architectures: headless CMS, commerce, and third-party integrations.
• Accessibility (A11Y) and internationalization (i18n/l10n) treated as baseline requirements, not phase-two extras.
• Hands-on experience shipping for large brands. You know their tech needs, their procurement, and their IT teams.
• Demonstrated experience building AI-enabled products, platforms, tools, or production workflows, not simply experimenting with generative AI.
• Strong understanding of agentic architectures, LLM orchestration, tool use, APIs, and AI-enabled developer workflows.
• Ability to move between technical strategy, rapid prototyping, architecture, and production engineering.
• Comfortable operating where the technology and the requirements are evolving simultaneously.
• Experience using LLMs and GenAI in production, and experience building or managing internal AI tooling.
• Agency or consulting background. You've run multiple client projects at once and know how scope, budget, and timeline fight each other.
• Excellent communication skills in English, spoken and written. Most of this job is explaining technical decisions to people who don't write code.
• A proven track record of leading and mentoring teams and creating a positive, productive atmosphere.
• Comfortable in front of clients, including their CTOs and IT teams, and comfortable saying no with a reason.
• A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, IT, or a related field, or equivalent experience. [confirm whether degree is required]
Highly Desired
• Experience working across an integrated agency network or a shared-services setup.
• Cloud infrastructure depth: AWS, hosting platforms, large data migrations, cost optimization.
• Familiarity with ERP or enterprise system integrations (NetSuite or similar).
• Experience building award-winning sites and/or mobile apps.
• A product excellence mindset (quantified by user reviews, strong adoption growth, etc.).
What Success Looks Like
• The engineering team is shipping on time, technical risks are surfaced early, and clients trust you as their senior technical partner.
• Engineers have clear growth paths, strong technical standards, and the support they need to do their best work.
• Estimates hold up, scope changes get surfaced early, in writing, and technical decisions are made with clear business tradeoffs.
• Our OS is being used by Mondo teams in real work, not simply demonstrated as an experiment.
• New capabilities move systematically from prototype to validated, production-ready tools and workflows.
• The team has a growing library of reusable AI agents, skills, connectors, frameworks, and workflows that accelerate delivery.
• AI-enabled workflows measurably improve productivity, quality, project margins, or speed to market.
• Mondo's technical practice becomes progressively less dependent on individual heroics and more dependent on reusable systems, patterns, and institutional knowledge.
• OS becomes a meaningful differentiator for Mondo Robot: a demonstration of how human creativity and machine intelligence can work together to produce better digital experiences.
Benefits
• Competitive medical (100% subsidized for employee), dental and vision plan offerings
• 401k with company match
• Comprehensive list of paid holidays including a holiday break and summer Fridays
• Flexible time off (FTO) policy
• Partial mobile phone service reimbursement
• Generous supplemental leave policies
• Numerous company-sponsored events / activities throughout the year