Engineering Director

ShipMonk isn't just a 3PL — we're the tech-powered growth partner for ecommerce brands, running 12+ owned fulfillment centers across the US, Canada, the UK, and Europe so our merchants can stress less and grow more. 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 inv…