Director, Engineering, Grid Platform & Reporting Services (remote Eligible)

Smartsheet Smartsheet · Seattle · United States · Engineering - Developers

Director of Engineering for Smartsheet's Grid Platform & Reporting Services, responsible for owning the engineering vision, charter, and goals for critical platform infrastructure and end-user features. The role involves leading 3-4 teams, driving architectural evolution, and ensuring high availability and scalability. A key aspect is driving AI adoption across the pillar, enabling AI-first design decisions, and aligning with the company's AI strategy.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own the engineering vision, charter, and goals for the Views Platform and Reporting pillar, partnering with your product counterpart to co-drive roadmap priorities across the Grid Service, Reports Engine, Dynamic Views, Grid Orchestration layer, and user-facing reporting surfaces.
  2. Lead 3-4 teams through a layer of Engineering Managers and Principal Engineers, holding them accountable for delivery, reliability, and team health while actively developing them as leaders.
  3. Drive architectural evolution of the core platform, balancing five-nines availability commitments against the scalability investments required to power Smartsheet's enterprise growth trajectory.
  4. Own the full reporting stack: both the backend infrastructure and the front-end reporting views and surfaces that enterprise customers depend on for project and portfolio management.
  5. Define and track engineering and business outcomes for the pillar, including SLO/SLA targets and production reliability signals. Identify systematic production challenges and build pillar-level mechanisms to address them before they become customer issues.

Skills

Required

  • Software engineering
  • System architecture
  • Distributed systems
  • High-availability platform infrastructure
  • Engineering leadership
  • Leading through multiple layers of management
  • Platform infrastructure ownership
  • User-facing product surface ownership
  • Tier 0/mission-critical service operation
  • Five-nines availability
  • Translating technical complexity to business outcomes
  • Customer empathy
  • Full-stack engineering leadership
  • Backend expertise
  • Frontend fluency
  • Designing/evolving distributed architectures
  • Cloud-native services on AWS
  • Observability tooling
  • Alerting
  • SLO/SLA management
  • Leading cross-functional technical programs
  • Data structures
  • Algorithms

Nice to have

  • AI adoption
  • AI productivity
  • AI-first design
  • Cross-product AI strategy alignment
  • Reporting services
  • Grid Service
  • Reports Engine
  • Dynamic Views
  • Grid Orchestration
  • Project and portfolio management
  • Scalability investments
  • Caching strategies
  • Data consistency tradeoffs
  • Performance optimization

What the JD emphasized

  • Own the engineering vision, charter, and goals
  • holding them accountable for delivery, reliability, and team health
  • Drive architectural evolution of the core platform
  • Own the full reporting stack
  • Define and track engineering and business outcomes
  • Identify systematic production challenges
  • building pillar-level mechanisms
  • Resolve architectural conflicts
  • making bold decisions
  • Set and maintain a high bar
  • build the mechanisms to sustain it
  • Think strategically about customer outcomes
  • guiding managers and principal engineers
  • address existing gaps
  • anticipate future enterprise needs
  • Represent the pillar in customer conversations
  • Communicate platform complexity clearly
  • Produce clear written artifacts
  • align teams and inform decisions
  • Drive AI adoption across the pillar
  • holding leaders accountable for AI productivity
  • enabling AI-first design decisions
  • ensuring alignment with cross-product AI strategy
  • Lead strategic hiring planning
  • model a high bar for talent
  • build an inclusive culture
  • develops and retains strong engineering managers and principal engineers
  • 11+ years of software engineering and system architecture experience
  • meaningful depth in distributed systems and high-availability platform infrastructure
  • 5+ years in engineering leadership
  • track record of leading through multiple layers of management
  • complex technical and product charter
  • owning both platform infrastructure and user-facing product surfaces simultaneously
  • track record of owning and operating tier 0 or mission-critical services at five-nines availability
  • hands-on technical credibility with engineers
  • understanding the work deeply
  • Demonstrated ability to translate between technical complexity and business outcomes
  • making infrastructure decisions legible to executives
  • product strategy legible to engineers
  • track record of customer empathy in practice
  • using customer context to prioritize platform investments
  • user-facing roadmaps
  • drive measurable business outcomes
  • Experience leading full-stack engineering organizations
  • depth on the backend
  • enough front-end fluency
  • hold a high bar across the whole stack
  • Hands-on experience designing or evolving distributed architectures under scale constraints
  • caching strategies
  • data consistency tradeoffs
  • performance optimization at volume
  • Experience building and scaling cloud-native services on AWS
  • proficiency in observability tooling, alerting, and SLO/SLA management at scale
  • Experience leading cross-functional technical programs
  • significant ambiguity and cross-team dependencies
  • deliver results under tough circumstances
  • Strong CS fundamentals

Other signals

  • Drive AI adoption across the pillar
  • holding leaders accountable for AI productivity
  • enabling AI-first design decisions
  • ensuring alignment with cross-product AI strategy