Director of Software Engineering

Leadership and Management

• Directly manage a team of Software Engineers and Quality Engineers - owning hiring, career growth, performance management, and day-to-day technical leadership.
• Own team health and performance - career growth conversations, performance management, succession planning, and building a culture of psychological safety and engineering excellence.
• Partner with product management to translate roadmap into technical strategy, sequence work effectively, and communicate tradeoffs between scope, quality, and timeline.
• Represent your team's technical capabilities and capacity to executive leadership - providing clear, honest reporting on progress, risks, and resource needs.
• Define and maintain hiring standards - conducting interviews, calibrating levels, and building a pipeline of strong engineering and quality talent.
• Champion engineering culture - continuous improvement, knowledge sharing, design reviews, blameless retrospectives, and cross-team collaboration.
• Coordinate dependencies between your team and other engineering teams (firmware, hardware, platform, DevOps) to deliver integrated product outcomes.

Technical Contribution

• Contribute directly to the codebase every sprint - designing and implementing critical
• features, services, and infrastructure in Java (Spring Boot), TypeScript (Vue/React), and
• Python.
• Conduct code reviews regularly - maintaining high standards for quality, security, and
• maintainability across the team's output.
• Debug and resolve complex production issues - working directly in the code and
• infrastructure to diagnose root causes and implement fixes.
• Own operational excellence for your services - incident response, SLOs/SLAs, production
• monitoring, and post-incident review processes.
• Personally use AI tools daily to accelerate development, design reviews, code generation,
• documentation, debugging, and decision-making - modeling the AI-first behavior expected
• of the team.
• Own quality holistically - ensuring functional, non-functional (performance, accessibility,
• security, reliability), and operational testing are embedded in the delivery lifecycle, not bolted
• on after

Architecture

• Drive architectural decisions at the product/team level - microservices decomposition,
• event-driven architecture (Kafka, SNS/SQS, EventBridge), serverless adoption, data storage
• strategy (SQL and NoSQL), and API design.
• Design and evolve event-driven systems using Kafka and AWS messaging services -
• defining topic strategy, consumer patterns, schema governance, and ensuring reliable,
• ordered processing for critical workflows.
• Set engineering standards and practices for your team - including code quality, testing
• strategy, CI/CD practices, architecture review processes, and release criteria.
• Drive an AI-first engineering strategy - identifying opportunities to integrate AI/LLM
• capabilities into products, development workflows, testing practices, and operational tooling.
• Manage technical debt strategically - balancing feature delivery with investment in platform
• reliability, test infrastructure, developer experience, and operational tooling.
• Own delivery outcomes for your product area - ensuring architectural choices support
• shipping features on time, at quality, and aligned with product and business goals.

• Significant experience in software engineering leadership - directly managing engineers
• while remaining an active hands-on contributor.
• Strong proficiency across the full stack - actively writing production code in Java (Spring
• Boot), TypeScript (Vue/React), and Python; not just reviewing or advising.
• Deep hands-on experience with AWS (or Azure) - compute (ECS, Lambda), storage (S3,
• RDS, DynamoDB), messaging (SNS/SQS, EventBridge, Kafka), networking, and deployment
• patterns.
• Experience designing and operating event-driven architectures using Kafka and/or cloudnative messaging (SNS/SQS, EventBridge) - including topic design, consumer group
• management, schema evolution, dead-letter handling, and observability.
• Demonstrated AI-first mindset - personally uses AI tools (coding assistants, LLMs,
• automation) daily in development workflows and has experience driving AI adoption across a
• team.
• Proven ability to make architecture decisions that scale - microservices, event-driven
• systems, serverless patterns, data modeling (SQL and NoSQL), and API design in production
• environments.
• Experience owning quality outcomes - not just delegating to QA but integrating quality
• engineering into team structure, sprint workflow, CI/CD, and release processes.
• Proven ability to hire, develop, and retain strong engineering talent across both software
• engineering and quality engineering disciplines.
• Track record of delivering software in agile/Scrum environments - sprint planning, backlog
• management, release cadence, and continuous delivery.
• Experience managing technical debt alongside feature delivery - making informed
• investment decisions that balance velocity with long-term platform health.
• Strong understanding of non-functional quality dimensions - performance engineering,
• accessibility (WCAG), security testing, and reliability/SLO management.
• Experience with CI/CD pipeline strategy, test automation architecture, and release
• engineering practices.
• Excellent communication skills - able to translate between engineering details and
• business/product language, report clearly to executives, and give direct feedback to reports.
• Experience driving operational excellence - incident management, production monitoring,
• SLOs, and post-incident processes., * Experience leading teams building public-safety, law enforcement, or mission-critical
• software systems with high reliability and compliance requirements.
• Experience building AI/LLM-powered product features - RAG, multi-agent workflows,
• computer vision, or intelligent automation - in production systems.
• Track record of transforming a team's engineering practices through AI adoption -
• measurably improving velocity, quality, or capability through AI-first workflows.
• Background in evidence management, chain-of-custody workflows, or regulated data
• handling.
• Experience managing teams that own both web application delivery and physical device
• software/integration testing.
• Background with compliance frameworks (FedRAMP, CJIS, SOC2) and how they impact
• engineering practices.
• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS platform architecture and the engineering tradeoffs
• involved.
• Track record building quality engineering practices from the ground up - establishing test
• automation, non-functional testing programs, and release quality standards for a growing org.
• Experience managing distributed or hybrid-remote engineering teams.
• Prior track record as a Staff or Principal-level IC - demonstrating the technical depth
• expected of someone who leads and contributes simultaneously.

Pulled from the full job description

• Tuition reimbursement
• Food provided
• 401(k)
• Health insurance
• 401(k) matching
• Paid time off
• Vision insurance, Why You'll Love Working Here:
• Flexible hybrid schedule
• Free chef-inspired lunch Monday-Thursday.
• 15 PTO days + floating holiday.
• Competitive benefits: medical, dental, vision, 401(k). We provide 401(k) matching per the terms of the 401(k) plan.
• Annual bonus.
• Tuition reimbursement.
• Career growth in a fast-growing, mission-driven company.
• Collaborative, purpose-driven culture.

Coreforce is an innovative technology company providing public safety organizations a comprehensive technology suite from dispatch to the courtroom. Coreforce delivers integrated technology designed to support public safety entities, regardless of organizational size. Our products - body cameras, in-car videos, mobile routers, and digital evidence systems- help public safety officers and first responders save lives, strengthen community trust, and enhance accountability.