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 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 so