Director of Engineering (Remote)
About the role
About GiveDirectly
GiveDirectly has delivered more than $1B in cash directly to 2+ million people living in poverty across 15 countries since 2011. We believe cash transfers are one of the most scalable, cost-effective, and dignified forms of aid, with the research to back it up. Our culture is candid, analytical, and non-hierarchical. We support high ownership and real professional growth.
About this role
We're hiring a Director of Engineering to build a best-in-class engineering department in a moment of rapid growth; we've more than doubled our engineering team in the last year and are continuing to hire.
Your initial focus will be on our cash delivery platform: you'll own the technical systems that deliver the next $4B to people in extreme poverty, our goal for the next nine years, with scenarios on the table that would require us to scale much faster. We recently launched a platform rebuild as a greenfield project, and the work ahead is scaling it from initial launch to delivering billions. This role is deliberately sequenced: you'll start close to the ground — directly managing engineers, partnering with our platform product lead on roadmap and delivery, and getting deep in the operational details (on-call, incident response) — because we believe the leader who builds that context firsthand is the one who can design the right organization for the next level of scale.
You will own maintaining and scaling a strong engineering culture through rapid growth: shaping how we hire and structure teams, recruiting and retaining a high talent density team, and building strong operating processes and culture that encourage open debate in search of the best outcomes for recipients rather than attachment to being right or looking good; continuous learning, improvement, and adoption of new tools; deep product ownership in service of impact for recipients; and strong judgment about tradeoffs. You'll set a high technical quality bar, pressure-testing designs and tradeoffs while still giving a very senior team high autonomy.
You'll shape our multi-year technical strategy: where the platform should be shared across product lines versus split or modular, when to build vs buy, and how to ensure the technical architecture supports our ambitious scaling goals.
Location & Time Zone Requirements
This role is fully remote but will directly manage team members spanning East Africa Time to US Pacific Time. You must overlap with East Africa Time by at least 3 hours. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of employment Visas in the U.S. or U.K. at this time.