Director, Engineering

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $250K – $350K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

Campfire is building the AI-native ERP for modern finance teams, backed by a $65M Series B from Accel and Ribbit Capital. Our engineering org is ~30 people today and growing to ~100, and we're hiring Directors of Engineering to lead that scale-up. Each Director owns a segment of the org — roughly 25–40 engineers across 3–5 teams — and will report to the CTO alongside two peer Directors. This is a manager-of-managers role: you'll hire and develop engineering managers, shape team structure within your area, and own how your teams plan, ship, and operate.

Responsibilities

• Own the org design for your area: team boundaries, charters, and staffing plans

• Lead, coach, and hold accountable 3–5 engineering managers; develop first-time managers and grow future leaders from the IC ranks

• Drive hiring for your teams: headcount planning, recruiting, interviewer training, and closing senior candidates

• Run planning and delivery for your area: roadmap alignment with product, quarterly commitments, and predictable execution across teams

• Uphold operational rigor expected of a financial-systems company: on-call, incident response, SLOs, and release practices that hold up to enterprise and audit scrutiny

• Partner with peer Directors, security, and compliance on cross-cutting concerns — shared platform, SOC 2, enterprise security reviews, AI governance

• Set and uphold engineering standards — code review, testing, observability, architecture decisions — across a Python/Django, PostgreSQL, Next.js, and AWS stack

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years managing engineers and 2+ years managing managers

• Led a group of 20+ engineers with multiple managers reporting to you, through a period of rapid growth

• Built or operated systems where correctness and auditability are non-negotiable: fintech, accounting, payments, or ERP

• Technically credible with senior ICs — able to review architecture and weigh in on data-model and infrastructure decisions

• Comfortable operating as one of several peer leaders: collaborative, low-ego, and effective at working across org boundaries

• Hands-on interest in running LLMs and agents in production

• Clear, direct communicator who writes well and gives hard feedback kindly

Bonus

• Experience taking a product through enterprise security and compliance (SOC 2, SSO/SAML, vendor reviews)

• Familiarity with revenue recognition, GAAP close, or accounting integrations (Stripe, Deel, Rippling, banks, payroll)

• Experience with MCP or building integrations for AI platforms

• Depth in Python and relational databases