Director, Software Engineering

Twilio Twilio · Enterprise · India · Remote · Engineering

Director, Software Engineering role at Twilio, leading multiple engineering teams or a critical domain area. Focuses on strategy, execution, organizational excellence, roadmap shaping, and delivery of scalable, reliable systems. Requires extensive software engineering and leadership experience, with expertise in system design, distributed systems, and reliability. Desired experience includes high-growth tech, cloud platforms, and SaaS.

What you'd actually do

  1. Define and drive the engineering strategy and roadmap for your area, ensuring alignment with business objectives
  2. Partner closely with product, architecture, and executive leadership to co-create strategy and translate it into actionable execution plans
  3. Build, inspire, and scale high-performing teams; foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement
  4. Establish robust operational mechanisms for predictable, high-quality delivery across complex, distributed systems
  5. Make investment trade-offs, prioritize resources, and ensure technical health and system reliability for the long term

Skills

Required

  • software engineering leadership
  • strategy and execution
  • team building and scaling
  • operational mechanisms
  • system design
  • distributed systems
  • system reliability
  • technical judgment
  • communication skills
  • influencing ability
  • cross-functional partnership

Nice to have

  • high-growth technology companies
  • cloud platforms
  • SaaS environments
  • architecting large-scale distributed systems
  • high-reliability platforms
  • geographically distributed teams
  • organizational change management
  • navigating ambiguity
  • Agile or Lean methodologies

What the JD emphasized

  • 15+ years of experience in software engineering, with a minimum of 5 years in senior engineering leadership roles (Director or above)
  • Deep expertise in software development life cycle, system design, distributed systems, and system reliability
  • Demonstrated ability to lead strategy and execution for large-scale, complex engineering organizations
  • Proven success building and scaling high-performing teams and establishing strong operational mechanisms
  • Strong technical judgement and capability to make portfolio-level trade-offs and prioritize investments
  • Excellent communication skills, influencing ability, and partnership with cross-functional stakeholders, including executive leadership
  • Track record of driving engineering excellence and championing best practices in system design, development, and operations