Director of Engineering

Brilliant NextGen is transforming the smart home experience, and they are seeking a Director of Engineering to lead a team of engineers in architecting and maintaining their backend systems. This role involves hands-on work across the backend and infrastructure stack, ensuring platform stability and delivering new features to support the company's growth.

Responsibilities:

• Lead a team of 7 engineers (FTE + Contract)
• Estimate work efforts, collaborate on requirements, and plan dev sprints in coordination with Product leadership
• Participate in the strategic direction of the company in collaboration with the rest of the Senior Leadership team
• Architect, build, test, deploy, and maintain backend features and services
• Design and extend GraphQL and RESTful APIs for Python-based services
• Develop and maintain gRPC backends and integrations with Redis and PostgreSQL
• Support communication and backend integrations for our fleet of Brilliant Controls (IoT)
• Mentor engineers, improve architecture quality, and drive backend best practices
• Architect, manage, and extend our AWS infrastructure using Terraform, Packer, and related tools
• Improve and scale our Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines
• Deploy, manage, and debug Linux servers and container-based systems
• Enhance observability using systems like Prometheus and Grafana to detect issues proactively
• Maintain infrastructure, tools, dependencies, and security posture
• Partner with product, design, and engineering teams to deliver new features and refine existing experiences
• Lead and collaborate on reliability improvements, workflow simplification, and operational best practices across the engineering organization

Requirements:

• 10+ years of experience in backend engineering; with at least 3 years of engineering team management
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience
• Deep experience with Python, modern programming languages, and shell scripting
• Strong expertise with AWS and core cloud infrastructure services
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
• Strong background in Linux systems
• Solid experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and caching systems (Redis)
• Background with gRPC, distributed systems
• Excellent communication skills and experience leading technical initiatives
• Experience with GraphQL and REST API design
• Strong interest and hands-on experimentation with LLMs or AI agents
• Background with real-time data communication
• Experience with containerization and container orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Work with Prometheus, Grafana, and observability pipelines
• Experience supporting IoT systems or device fleets
• Familiarity with advanced AWS patterns and tooling (VPC networking, IAM, autoscaling)
• An interest in video streaming protocols (WebRTC, RTSP)