Director of Engineering - Navana AI

# Director of Engineering ## Company Overview Not specified. ## Job Summary We are looking for a **Director of Engineering** to lead our engineering efforts as we scale. You’ll be responsible for driving technical excellence, guiding high-performance teams, and co-creating with AI scientists to bring research into production. This role offers a unique opportunity to work hands-on with high-performance Golang systems, cutting-edge AI models, and cloud-native infrastructure while also setting the direction for our engineering culture and product evolution. ## Responsibilities - **Team Leadership:** Build, mentor, and scale high-performing engineering teams that specialize in Golang, cloud technologies, and systems architecture. - **Technical Strategy:** Define and execute the engineering roadmap to ensure performance, scalability, and reliability of products. - **Research to Production:** Collaborate closely with AI scientists to translate innovative research into robust, production-ready systems. - **System Design:** Architect low-latency, high-concurrency distributed systems utilizing technologies such as WebSockets, streaming APIs, and inference runtimes. - **Customer Collaboration:** Support sales and customer teams in assessments of feasibility, solution architecture, and feature trade-offs. - **Engineering Culture:** Instill best practices in code quality, testing, security, and DevOps including Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), observability, and scalability. - **Cross-functional Influence:** Partner with Product and Go-To-Market (GTM) teams to align engineering priorities with customer value and business objectives. ## Qualifications - **8+ years of software engineering experience**, with at least **3 years in engineering leadership** roles. - **Strong expertise in Golang**, focusing on systems programming, concurrency, and performance optimization. - **Deep understanding of distributed systems**, cloud environments (Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services), and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker). - Experience collaborating with **AI/ML researchers** and translating experimental models into production-ready applications. - Proven capability to effectively **lead and scale engineering teams** while remaining hands-on as necessary. - Excellent communication skills for engaging with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. - Experience in **customer-facing technical conversations**, addressing feasibility and architectural trade-offs. ## Preferred Skills - Exposure to **speech/audio AI systems** such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-To-Speech (TTS), or Natural Language Processing (NLP). - Previous experience in a **startup or early-stage company** environment. ## Experience - A minimum of **8+ years of software engineering experience**, with substantial leadership experience in engineering. ## Environment Not specified. ## Salary Not specified. ## Growth Opportunities Not specified. ## Benefits Not specified.