Director, Engineering - Pollfish & Platform

Job Description:

Strategic Imperative: 

The Director, Engineering - Pollfish & Platform is integral to the success of the business because this role leads the execution, delivery, and technical health of a critical engineering domain that supports product innovation, operational reliability, and scalable growth. This leader ensures engineering teams, systems, and development practices are aligned to business priorities while translating broader technical strategy into effective execution. The role is critical to improving delivery consistency, strengthening system performance, elevating engineering practices, and building a high-performing organization capable of supporting a complex, data-driven product environment.

Who We Are!  
Pollfish, a Prodege, LLC company, is an online market research survey platform where data driven brands bring market research in-house for faster and smarter decision making. We have a proprietary network of 250M consumers/year which enables companies to connect with and understand real consumers worldwide in a fast, easy and cost-effective way.
 

Primary Objectives: 

• Engineering Leadership & Team Effectiveness: Lead and develop a high-performing engineering organization that delivers reliable, scalable, and maintainable solutions.

• Technical Direction & Architecture Execution: Guide architectural decisions and system design within a defined engineering domain to ensure scalability, reliability, and alignment with broader platform strategy.

• Product Delivery & Execution Excellence: Drive predictable, high-quality delivery across multiple teams through strong planning, prioritization, execution discipline, and engineering best practices.

• Systems Reliability & Operational Maturity: Strengthen system uptime, observability, incident response, and operational performance across critical services and infrastructure.

• Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner with Product, Data, Security, and business stakeholders to translate priorities into technical plans, roadmaps, and delivery outcomes.

• Engineering Standards & Continuous Improvement: Promote development standards, quality practices, and continuous improvement processes that support consistency, maintainability, and long-term engineering effectiveness.

Qualifications - To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each job duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Detailed Job Duties: (typical monthly, weekly, daily tasks which support the primary objectives)

Engineering Leadership & Team Management

• Lead, coach, and develop engineering managers and senior engineers across assigned functional areas.

• Support organizational design and team structure to ensure effective delivery, clear accountability, and sustainable team operations.

• Establish performance expectations and provide ongoing coaching, feedback, and development support to strengthen manager and team effectiveness.

• Partner on hiring, workforce planning, and succession readiness for critical roles within the organization.

• Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, technical excellence, and continuous improvement.

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Architecture & Technical Direction

• Drive the technical direction for backend, platform, data, infrastructure, and related systems within the assigned engineering scope.

• Partner with senior engineering leadership to evolve architecture in ways that improve scalability, reliability, maintainability, and delivery speed.

• Guide technical decision-making across teams, ensuring solutions align with established architectural standards and business priorities.

• Oversee the continued maturation of distributed systems, cloud-native services, data pipelines, and platform capabilities.

• Balance technical quality, business urgency, and resourcing realities when making engineering tradeoff decisions.

Delivery Execution & Operational Excellence

• Own delivery health across multiple engineering teams, ensuring plans, priorities, dependencies, and risks are actively managed.

• Drive disciplined execution through strong development practices, release processes, testing strategies, and engineering workflows.

• Partner with Product and cross-functional stakeholders to align engineering capacity and sequencing with business priorities.

• Identify and remove execution blockers, escalating issues when needed to maintain momentum and delivery confidence.

• Monitor team performance, delivery predictability, and operational effectiveness, implementing improvements where needed.

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Systems Reliability, Scalability & Performance

• Oversee the design, operation, and continuous improvement of large-scale, high-throughput systems within the role’s area of responsibility.

• Ensure teams maintain strong practices around system reliability, observability, incident response, and operational readiness.

• Drive improvements in uptime, latency, scalability, resiliency, and cost efficiency across supported systems.

• Partner with Infrastructure, DevOps, Security, and platform teams to strengthen production health and operational maturity.

• Ensure engineering teams proactively address root causes, technical debt, and recurring operational issues.

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Engineering Standards & Governance

• Reinforce adherence to engineering standards, architectural patterns, documentation requirements, and secure development practices.

• Partner with leadership to implement and uphold processes that support code quality, maintainability, compliance, and operational discipline.

• Ensure teams follow appropriate controls related to security, privacy, and regulatory requirements.

• Support prioritization and management of technical debt to protect long-term platform health and team velocity.

• Promote consistency in how teams design, build, test, release, and support software.

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Cross-Functional Partnership & Communication

• Partner with Product, Data, Security, Infrastructure, and business stakeholders to translate priorities into actionable engineering plans.

• Communicate progress, delivery risks, technical tradeoffs, and resource needs clearly to senior leadership and cross-functional partners.

• Contribute to roadmap discussions by providing practical input on feasibility, sequencing, dependencies, and implementation risk.

• Build strong working relationships across functions to improve alignment, transparency, and execution quality.

• Represent engineering in planning and operational discussions as a credible, solutions-oriented leader.

Additional Management Responsibilities:

• Performance Management: setting and managing goals, on-going coaching, corrective action, annual reviews, rewards/recognition, and team/individual development

• Employee Life Cycle Management: headcount forecasting, job descriptions, recruiting/hiring, termination 

• Governance: ensuring compliance to company policy/practice (e.g. attendance, behavior, workplace attire), ensuring compliance to employment law (e.g. time keeping, anti-harassment and diversity)

• Leadership: ensures availability to staff, team building, building rapport with individuals, encouraging strong collaborative relationships between individuals and departments, facilitating a healthy work/life mix, solicits and applies feedback (internal and external to team), self-improvement as a leader/manager of people

• Culture Ambassador: proactively demonstrate and cultivate a culture of cooperative collaboration, strong work ethic, solutions-orientation, quality focus, results-orientation, relaxed/enjoyable atmosphere, team- and individual- celebration, and company/product pride

The MUST Haves: (ex: job cannot be done without these skills, education, experience, certifications, licenses) 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Eight or more (8+) years of software engineering experience, including five or more (5+) years leading engineering teams in complex, distributed environments.

• Proven experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, and data-intensive services.

• Demonstrated success leading multi-team engineering organizations, including engineering managers and senior individual contributors.

• Deep expertise in modern backend architectures, including microservices, event-driven systems, and distributed data platforms.

• Strong command of cloud infrastructure, container orchestration, CI/CD, observability, and modern software development practices.

• Ability to apply AI and machine learning tools responsibly in support of predictive modeling, analysis, experimentation, and solution development, including validating outputs, documenting assumptions, and adhering to company security and confidentiality standards.

• Ability to translate business priorities into technical plans and communicate progress, risks, and tradeoffs effectively to senior stakeholders.

• Track record of developing high-performing engineering teams and strengthening execution, accountability, and engineering quality.

The Nice to Haves: (preferred additional skills, education, experience, certifications, licenses) 

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field preferred.

• Experience in SaaS, data-intensive products, or high-volume transactional systems.

• Background in Scala, Java, Akka, Kafka, or similar distributed systems technologies.

• Experience in regulated or compliance-heavy environments (e.g., finance, healthcare, government).

• Prior experience in a senior technical leadership role, such as Lead Engineer, Engineering Manager, Principal Engineer, or Architect.

• Experience leading modernization, platform improvement, or operational maturity initiatives in complex engineering environments.

Perks & Benefits:

• An attractive salary package
• Part of an innovative Global Tech Company
• Private Health Insurance
• Weekly Office Events - Catered Lunch and Breakfast
• Stocked Kitchen
• Company Outings & Quarterly Events
• Hybrid Working
• Meal Coupons - Monthly
• LinkedIn Learning & Training Opportunities/Budget
• Mental Health Benefits - Wellness Coach App Subscription
• Great office location in the city center - Parking slots available
• Gym Subscription - UP Fit
• Quarterly Charitable Giving Allowance
• Peer recognition Allowance