Director of Engineering

When we started in 2014, our focus was on product managers in smaller teams who lacked a great product management tool. Today, we are the leading product management platform, and as we continue to grow, we are now helping more and more enterprise companies with thousands of employees to build products that matter.

We believe Productboard's greatest differentiator is enabling our customers to collect, understand, and act upon data from the market and empower them to organize them into Insights, understand their customers, and align their company around the most impactful opportunities.

About the team

Join a team that’s not just building a product, but shaping the future of Productboard through the strategic platformization of our solution. This isn’t merely about adding features; it’s about architecting a scalable, flexible, and user-centric ecosystem that enhances every function across our platform. As the Director of Platform Engineering and Engineering Site Lead for our Prague office, you will be at the helm of this transformation, driving innovation and ensuring our platform evolves into a robust foundation for product teams globally.

In this pivotal role, you will lead a high-performing team of 20-30 engineers, including seasoned managers and emerging talent. Additionally, you will provide dotted-line leadership to local teams across various engineering domains outside the direct scope of platform engineering, ensuring alignment and synergy across our Prague office. Your leadership will be critical in overseeing the development and optimization of key platform components, such as our public APIs, comprehensive integration frameworks, and advanced query engine. These elements are crucial to scaling our operations and delivering precision-driven data experiences to our users.

Moreover, you will support our Permissions and Governance team, overseeing all enterprise security features, including Authentication/Authorization (AuthN/AuthZ), Custom Roles, Audit Logs, and more. This team ensures our platform adheres to the highest standards of security and compliance, empowering us to serve enterprise clients with confidence.

This role is a unique opportunity for a visionary leader passionate about driving large-scale innovation. You will have the chance to influence the direction of our platform, tackle complex challenges, and deliver solutions that power diverse, cutting-edge product experiences. If you thrive in a dynamic environment where ownership, collaboration, and problem-solving are paramount, and are excited by the prospect of leading a key engineering site, this position offers a deeply rewarding and impactful career path.

About having the right experience

Driving Technical Strategy

As a prominent leader in our Prague office, you must have a proven track record in establishing and driving technical strategy. You will need to excel in managing and guiding top-tier platform teams, where scale and resilience are crucial. Balancing flexibility, velocity and resilience. You will help teams make informed trade-offs that align with business objectives. Additionally, fostering a vibrant office engineering culture in Prague and Brno through initiatives like brown bag sessions and technical meetups will be key for your success. Collaboration with Talent Acquisition to strengthen our public engineering brand in the Czech Republic will also be a significant aspect of this role.

People Management

On the people management side, you should have substantial experience in managing and mentoring managers and senior ICs, helping them reach their full potential. You will be responsible for hiring and retaining top talent, ensuring that our teams are high-performing and positively engaged. Creating an environment where individuals and teams thrive is essential, especially in the context of leading hybrid teams that include both in-office and remote members across Europe.

Process Improvement

Furthermore, you will be expected to make a substantial contribution to refining and enhancing engineering processes for your team and globally contribute to improving the global organization. This includes identifying opportunities for process improvements, implementing best practices, and ensuring that workflows are optimized for efficiency and effectiveness. Your role will involve driving process changes that support both the technical and people aspects of the team, ensuring that our engineering practices are continually evolving and improving while ensuring that processes do no become the objectives, but serves a purpose.

About you

On top of classic hard and soft skill needed to be generally successful as a engineering leader, we need someone that has the following criteria:

• Product mindset: We do not want generalists. Productboard has been build by people passionate about the mission to improve Product organization create better products. It is important to have a leader with whom this resonates. We need people able to dive deeper in the understanding of the product, than in typical SaaS companies. To be successful at Productboard, we need all to clearly understand the product to a great level of details. And be in love with the problem space.
• Technical acumen: We need at all level a strong technical chop for our leaders. Hands on enough to be able to justify the choices of their teams in terms of implementation. Hands on enough to help the team make the best build vs buy analysis. Hands-on enough to represent their teams in high level product and architecture decisions.
• Execution oriented: We value the Get Impactful Things Done (GITD) attitude. Leaders joining the company should not only be servant leader but be at the forefront of execution. Able to step in to unblock teams, able to identify in advance roadblocks and actively resolve them. A director should be a force of proposal to help his leaders organize their team work, identify room for improvement to ensure great execution. He/She also should be a driver of (technical or non-technical) initiatives and lead by example.
• Bar raiser: We are looking for a leader who will consistently raise the bar for our Engineering leaders, both managers and individual contributors. This person will set and uphold high expectations, ensuring that our engineering team continually strives for excellence. They will challenge our leaders to grow, innovate, and deliver top-tier results, fostering a culture where constant improvement is the norm.
• Culture Fit: Leader at Productboard should embrace the key values we have and embody : Productboard values and our SPEED Engineering Principles ).
• Cheer Leader: As an effective team member, it's essential to be a supportive and enthusiastic. This means being a positive influence on your colleagues, providing encouragement when needed, and celebrating their successes. By doing so, you create a culture of collaboration and motivation that fuels innovation, productivity, and teamwork. Such a mindset fosters an environment where individuals feel empowered to take risks, share ideas, and push themselves to excel. In this role, we're seeking someone who will not only drive results but also inspire and uplift their colleagues, making them an integral part of our high-performing team.

Tech stack

We work with the following frameworks, tools, and languages:

• Frontend: TypeScript, React.js
• Backend: JVM/Kotlin, TypeScript/Node.js, Ruby, Kafka
• Storage: Postgres, Elastic, Redis
• Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform
• Authorization: Oso

You can look forward to the following benefits:

💰Stock options

💻 MacBook Pro + 34″ monitor

📚 Budget for online courses, books, and conferences

🏝 5 weeks of vacation and sick days

❤️ 1 Volunteer Day per year for you to help causes close to your heart

🍲 Free snacks, drinks, and yummy catered lunches every day (or lunch delivered to your home)

💚 shared Headspace account for mindfulness & mental health

🏋 MultiSport card to access sports facilities in Prague

🍹Team events, such as happy hours, off-sites, and retreats

⏱ Flexible working hours and home office

🧒🏻 Parental benefits

🎓Language lessons

🥕 Carrot - fertility benefits

About our culture

Imagine working in a place where everything matters — most importantly, you. At Productboard, values aren’t just something we like to talk about, they’re something we live and breathe. We believe in creating a work environment where:

• People feel empowered, supported, and included
• Trust and transparency are built into the way we work
• Creativity, curiosity, and continuous improvement are encouraged and nurtured every day

Forming our company values was a group effort, with every employee allowed to contribute. From profit-sharing initiatives, like stock options, to open calendars and communication, we don’t waste time on politics or ego. We champion openness by sharing our goals, success, and failures.

Join colleagues who love what they do and who are invested in their work environment and the future of the company. Help shape our company, culture, and product!

Check out our People of Productboard, Instagram profile, and People of Productboard FB page for a real feel of what life is like at Productboard.

Equal Opportunity Employer Statement

We are an equal opportunity employer and champion equity. It is our aim to help people from all backgrounds, cultures, and groups realize their full potential at Productboard. We do not tolerate any discrimination or harassment based upon gender identity, race, color, religion, age, sexual orientation, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, national origin, veteran status, or any other bias covered by appropriate law. All aspects of employment, including hiring, training, promotion, and terminations, are based on merit, competence, performance, and business needs. We are committed to an inclusive hiring process and provide all candidates with equal opportunity to demonstrate their abilities. Togetherness is one of our core values, and our Diversity Council helps to ensure that we uphold the values of authenticity, humanity, and diversity to create an environment where every person matters. We are committed to leading by example to drive societal change.

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