Senior Director, Engineering

About Starburst

At Starburst, we are working to dismantle the status quo of data silos and vendor lock-in every single day. For decades, database companies have held their customers hostage and we believe that’s just plain wrong. Starburst offers a full-featured data lake analytics platform, built on open source Trino. Our platform includes all the capabilities needed to discover, organize, and consume data without the need for time-consuming and costly migration projects. Today more than 300 leading organizations trust us to make better decisions faster. 

Though Starburst has raised $414M in venture funding from top investors, we were founded in a rather unusual way as we bootstrapped the business with customers and revenue from the very beginning! We are a remote-first company with employees all over the world and are proud to be named a Best Place to Work. Come join our team of All-Stars!

About the role

As a senior engineering leader at Starburst, you will oversee and drive our engineering teams based in Poland, Israel, and across Europe. Your responsibilities will include hiring, building, and developing these teams to ensure they are aligned with our mission and roadmap, and delivering technical projects with efficiency and quality. You will collaborate cross-functionally with key senior leaders, including engineering leadership and product management, to ensure alignment with our product and technical strategy. This is a pivotal role and offers a tremendous opportunity to have a significant impact on our organization

As a Senior Director of Engineering at Starburst you will:

• Lead and manage Starburst’s EMEA-based Engineering teams, primarily located in Poland and Israel, but with additional team members across Europe as part of our distributed work environment.
• Help to build and develop our EMEA teams, ensuring that they have strong clarity of mission and roadmap, operate effectively to drive significant technical projects, and are staffed for success, regularly achieving high quality, velocity, and predictability.
• Mentor and develop Engineering leaders and team members, especially Engineering Managers and Senior technical staff, promoting professional growth, technical excellence, and great engineering culture.
• Represent the EMEA Engineering organization, helping it integrate well into the larger global Engineering organization, cultural norms, and ways of working, while maintaining a strong local culture and EMEA team identity. Develop and implement processes to address regional challenges such as timezone differences, work style variations, cultural and language diversity, and communication styles. Ensure that our EMEA teams feel connected and valued.
• Build and maintain strong relationships with key stakeholders across the organization, including senior Engineering leadership, our CTO group, and Product Management leadership, ensuring that our EMEA technical leadership is strongly integrated and aligned with our product and technical strategy and delivery operations.

Some of the things we look for:

• 5+ years of Director or higher experience, managing Engineering Managers across multiple distributed teams in a SaaS environment, ideally a data or infrastructure product such as Starburst.
• Solid technical experience, and ideally database or big data domain knowledge. Can speak fluently about technical considerations of our domain, technical issues around managing an infrastructure product on modern architectures.
• Strong intrapersonal skills. You are great at getting diverse groups of people to resolve contentious decisions, and you are great at motivating people.
• Experience operating in a US-headquartered technology company.
• Proven track record of developing high-functioning teams with excellence in delivery and operations due to strong team engagement and great developer experience.
• Ideally located in Poland, but at a minimum conveniently able to travel for regular visits. Polish language skills are a plus.
• Passion for engineering hygiene and operational excellence. You have the know-how to build an engineering organization that delivers it. You are familiar with agile processes, continuous integration, and test automation.
• Adept at distilling complex and ambiguous situations into actionable plans for your team.
• Advocate of not only leveraging the Open Source community but also giving back.

Where could this role be based?

• Ideally located in Poland, but at a minimum conveniently able to travel for regular visits.