Director of Engineering

 

ShipMonk is hiring a Director of Engineering to lead and grow our Product Development organization in the Czech Republic. You will own the engineering arm that powers ShipMonk’s e-commerce fulfillment platform — the system that orchestrates warehouses, autonomous robots, iOS picker devices, conveyors, and carriers to move up to 100,000 orders per day for more than 1,500 merchants. We are transitioning from a high-growth scale-up into a mature, domain-driven architecture, and we are looking for a leader who can keep delivery velocity high through that transition, build a team that gets visibly stronger every quarter, and translate company strategy into engineering outcomes that move the business.

We hire Directors first and foremost for ownership, delivery, and business thinking. Technical credibility matters — you must be able to sit in an architecture conversation with senior engineers and earn their respect — but we are not looking for a technical superhero. We are looking for a leader who ships through their teams, builds strong people, and makes hard calls about scope, headcount, and priority with the merchant in mind, and staffs teams against the highest-ROI initiatives rather than building work to keep existing teams busy.

About the Role

You will lead a meaningful slice of ShipMonk’s Product Development organization. You will report to the SVP of Engineering and partner directly with Product, Analytics, Operations, and Warehouse Engineering leadership to set direction and unblock delivery.

This role is a clear growth platform. The expectations below describe a Director at ShipMonk; with the right results, the natural growth path is Senior Director of Engineering, with company-wide technical and organizational scope.

The Engineering Environment

You don’t need to be the deepest expert in our stack — but you will be expected to be conversant in it, ask sharp questions in design reviews, and jump in to triage when a critical system is on fire.

• Backend & DB: PHP 8.5, Symfony 7.4, Doctrine ORM 3, MySQL 8 (terabyte-sized).
• Infrastructure: Dockerized locally, deployed to AWS-hosted Kubernetes via Argo CD, multiple times a day.
• Workflow & CI/CD: Monorepo on GitLab CI with PHPStan, PHP_CodeSniffer, PHPUnit, custom rules, and security scans.
• Testing & Reliability: 15,000+ database integration tests; strict two-round code review.
• Observability: DataDog, Sentry, Opsgenie; HA, failover, and autoscaling are baseline.
• Open source: github.com/shipmonk-rnd.

Desired Experience

We weight ownership, delivery, and business thinking first — that is the bar. Technical credibility is the necessary floor; you don’t need to be the strongest engineer in the room, but you must be respected in it.

Required

• 8+ years of professional experience in software development, with at least 4 years in engineering leadership roles (Manager, Senior Manager, Director or higher).
• Direct experience managing managers, not just individual contributors.
• Track record of running multiple teams (typically 25–60 engineers in total) delivering production software in a fast-paced environment.
• Demonstrable ownership of an org’s delivery: examples where you took an underperforming or unfocused team and visibly improved throughput, quality, retention, or business impact.
• Hands-on hiring track record — you have personally hired senior engineers and managers who turned out to be strong.
• Strong business-thinking: a concrete example where you killed scope, re-sequenced a roadmap, or pushed back on a leadership ask in service of a better business outcome. Track record of allocating engineers to initiatives based on quantified business impact — including making the call to redeploy or reduce headcount when an initiative no longer justifies the investment.
• Comfortable with modern web/backend engineering practices, Git, CI/CD, observability tooling, and incident response — enough to be credible in design and incident reviews.
• Strong written English; you will lead async discussions, write strategy docs, and run cross-functional decisions in writing.

Strongly Preferred

• Experience in e-commerce, logistics, fulfillment, WMS/OMS, or any domain where software directly controls physical operations in real time.
• Experience scaling an engineering org through a scale-up-to-mature transition — including formalizing career ladders, performance processes, and on-call/incident practices.
• Familiarity with a PHP / Symfony / Doctrine / MySQL backend stack, or a comparable mature monolith-plus-services environment, and with monorepo workflows.
• Experience driving Strangler-Fig or similar monolith-decomposition programs in a live, revenue-generating system.
• Track record of adopting AI-assisted development across an org and measurably moving velocity or quality.
• Experience leading distributed teams across multiple European countries.
• Public technical or leadership footprint: blog posts, talks, OSS contributions, conference participation.

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS, Software Engineering, or a related field preferred but not required. A track record of running successful engineering orgs outweighs formal qualifications.

Key Responsibilities

Lead by Example — Set the Standard

We expect Directors to be the most visible role model for ShipMonk values in their part of the org. People in your teams should be able to point at how you behave and say “that’s what Own It looks like.”

• Stay close enough to the work to be credible. Read PRs in your area on a regular cadence, sit in on design reviews, and jump on a pager rotation when an incident demands it. Never become a “PowerPoint Director.”
• Be approachable and consistent. Senior engineers, junior engineers, PMs, and recruiters should all find you the same person on a good day and a bad day.
• Be open to feedback — from your direct reports, from peers, from your manager, from merchants — and visibly act on it.
• Hold yourself to the same standard you expect from your team: candor, commitment, follow-through.

Translate Strategy into Delivery

• Take the company strategy and the SVP of Engineering’s priorities and turn them into a concrete roadmap and OKRs for your teams — not a wishlist.
• Sequence work so the highest-merchant-impact items ship first. Make scope cuts explicit and defensible. Never let “everything is priority one” survive in a team you run.
• Own the cross-team contract with Product, Operations, and Warehouse Engineering. When dependencies slip, escalate early, in writing, with proposed options — not at the deadline with bad news.
• Run a transparent quarterly OKR cycle: set, communicate, review, course-correct. Surface what you killed, not just what you shipped. Staff to initiatives, not the other way around — people follow the highest-ROI work; never invent work to fill seats.

Build, Hire, and Develop a High-Performing Team

• Own headcount end-to-end for your area: forecast, justify, hire, onboard. Every new and replacement requisition must carry a documented ROI justification covering at least the OPEX of the role, tied to a specific project the FTE will work on next quarter; you orchestrate this — pick the project, collect the ROI from the PM, validate with Finance, hand it to the Recruiter in writing. When the ROI isn’t there, don’t open the req — redeploy the headcount where it is, or give it back. Work with recruiting as a true partner, not as a ticket queue.
• Hire to maintain the two-thirds senior composition that makes our delivery model work. Defend the bar in interview debriefs, even under pressure to fill a seat.
• Run the performance cycle with rigor and honesty. Give candid feedback often, write reviews that someone could actually use to grow, and act decisively when someone is not performing — including on yourself.
• Grow senior engineers and managers into the next level. The signal that you are doing this well is that promotions inside your org are believable to people outside it.
• Take an active role in compensation calibration. Make sure pay reflects performance and that no quiet inequities are growing in your team.

Own Delivery, Quality, and Production

• Be accountable for what your teams ship, when they ship it, and how it behaves in production.
• Track and improve the metrics that matter: delivery throughput, lead time, escaped-defect rate, incident frequency, on-call load, and merchant-impact tickets in your domain. Use them to drive decisions, not as decoration.
• Enforce engineering standards — two-round review, PHPStan rules, integration-test discipline, observability requirements — without becoming a bottleneck. Push standards into automation wherever possible.
• When there is a major incident in your area, you own the response, the postmortem, and the systemic preventive action. Change the Score — never blame an individual; always change the system.

Run a Business-Oriented Engineering Org

• Know your domain’s economics. Be able to state, in plain language, which merchant segments (Silver, Gold, Platinum) and which operational flows your org serves, and how your roadmap moves the needle for them.
• Frame technical investment — refactors, Strangler-Fig extractions from the PPS monolith, infrastructure upgrades — in business terms: merchant impact, support-ticket reduction, velocity gained, cost avoided. “Cleaner code” alone is not a justification at this level.
• Own a real budget. Build bottom-up forecasts, defend them, and live within them. Make trade-offs between headcount, tooling, vendors, and infrastructure with eyes open. Every QBR, justify all resources in your org — not just new hires — against the ROI of the initiatives they support. Resources that cannot be justified get reallocated. This is not an HR exercise; this is how we make sure we ship what matters.
• Spend time where the business lives: merchant support tickets in your domain, escalation calls, fulfillment-center visits when the opportunity arises. Bring what you learn back into the roadmap.

Drive AI-Assisted Engineering as a Competitive Advantage

• Treat AI-assisted development (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, our internal Claude skills, and our plugin marketplace) as a real productivity lever, not a slogan. Set expectations, share what works, remove the friction.
• Champion contributions to internal tooling — PHPStan rules, sniffs, skills, plugins — so the floor of quality and velocity rises faster than headcount.
• Look for places where automation can replace recurring manual work in your org, and fund the work to make it happen.

Communicate and Collaborate

• Communicate clearly upward to leadership, sideways to peers, and downward to your teams. Default to writing — in Asana or Confluence — when the message needs to land more than once.
• Make decisions visible. When you change priorities, say so explicitly, with the reasoning. Engineers should never have to guess what changed.
• Sell ShipMonk and your org externally — to candidates, to internal moves, to the wider Czech engineering community. You are a hiring magnet, not just a hiring manager.

Live the ShipMonk Values

• Own It: if something is broken in your org — a process, a metric, a person dynamic, a runbook, a cross-team handoff — it is yours to fix, even if you did not cause it.
• Merchant First: when there is a real trade-off between engineering elegance and merchant impact, you lean merchant-first and you document why. The same applies to headcount: every seat is allocated to the highest-ROI merchant-facing initiative we can put it on, not preserved by inertia.
• People Make ShipMonk: invest in the people on your team and around them. Give and receive feedback with candor and respect. Assume positive intent. Challenge ideas, not people.
• Change the Score: treat every incident, missed deadline, or attrition event as a systemic signal, not individual blame. Always propose a structural change.
• Get Shit Done: debate, commit, move on. Once a decision is made, execute. Do not re-litigate it in Slack.

What Success Looks Like

• In the first 90 days: you have built relationships with every direct report, mapped the strengths and gaps of your teams, formed a clear view of merchant impact for each domain you own, and surfaced a short, ranked list of what you will change in the next two quarters.
• In the first six months: your delivery and quality metrics show a defensible trend in the right direction; at least one structural improvement (process, headcount shape, tooling, on-call) is live and producing results; performance reviews under your area are honest and useful; and you have hired or promoted at least one strong leader into the org.
• In year one: your part of Product Development is visibly the kind of org other teams want to model. Your managers are noticeably stronger. Your domain’s roadmap is tightly coupled to merchant outcomes. You are an obvious candidate for expanded scope and the growth path toward Senior Director of Engineering.