Engineering Director - Foundations

About Staffbase

We inspire people to achieve great things together. Our mission is to help organizations unlock the power of inspirational communication. Our award-winning communications channels - intranet, employee app and email - deliver experiences that drive engagement and inspire hearts and minds.

We’re headquartered in Chemnitz, Germany, with offices in many locations throughout the world, including New York, London, Berlin and Dresden. Our international team counts more than 750 employees from 45+ nationalities and we have a growing base of 2200+ customers that want to transform their employee experience. We are rapidly scaling, post-Series E ($115 million funding), have strong-growing revenue, and our customers love us.

Staffbase is on a mission to help companies communicate more effectively with their employees. Our platform is the central hub for thousands of businesses worldwide, powered by a resilient and scalable foundation. As our Director of Engineering, Foundations, you'll play a key role in this mission. You will guide the teams responsible for evolving and supporting the core platform and infrastructure that enable all our product innovation.

This is an important role for a visionary leader who is passionate about nurturing world-class platforms, cultivating a culture of technical excellence, and enabling engineering teams to do their best work. You'll oversee the core services that support our products, from web and native app delivery, through our cloud architecture, to our internal developer tools and data engineering pipelines. 

You will report directly to the SVP of Engineering and lead an inclusive, collaborative organisation of around 30 people. Your leadership will help create a culture where everyone can do their best work, contribute ideas, and grow their careers.

Our environment

• Working with skilled and similar-minded professionals in a team that values diversity and inclusivity
• We aim to create a flexible and agile work environment that promotes the well-being and work-life balance of our employees
• We believe that team events during working hours play a vital role in building an exceptionally effective team, and we encourage them
• We are enthusiastic about technology and committed to using it to improve the world
• We follow the "You build it, you run it" approach and take pride in it
  

What you'll be doing

• Engineering Leadership: Guide, mentor, and inspire a team of Engineering Managers and Staff Engineers. Foster a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous learning
• Team Support: Provide direction and encouragement to the teams delivering our web and native apps, internal developer tools, APIs, QA, cloud infrastructure (SRE), application security, and data engineering
• Platform Vision: Shape and carry forward the technical roadmap for our core platform, infrastructure, and security. Serve as the primary advocate for the Foundations Unit, ensuring platform initiatives are aligned with business needs and informed by customer feedback
• Product and Customer Focus: Promote a customer-centric approach within the Foundations Unit, including engaging with customers on infrastructure and various non-functional requirements, and helping the business navigate our competitive landscape through the lens of an infrastructure specialist

What you need to be successful

• Significant experience leading and developing platform or SRE teams, including managing managers and building organisational capability
• A product-oriented mindset with a proven ability to create a platform vision and roadmap guided by business goals
• Strong technical understanding of modern platform engineering, cloud infrastructure (based on Kubernetes), and engineering best practices
• Excellent communication and relationship-building skills to create strong cross-functional connections and enable collaborative cross-team projects.
• A balance of strategic vision and pragmatic execution, with the ability to make and drive informed decisions and translate long-term goals into meaningful, immediate progress

What you'll get

• Competitive Compensation - we offer attractive salary packages including  LTIP (unit-based Long Term Incentive Plan). Employees receive units (based on job level) that have no initial value, but will crystallize upon an exit event and turn into cash. An exit event is a public listing of Staffbase or an acquisition by another company
• Flexibility - we offer flexible working time models and the option of hybrid work, and support this with a yearly flex work allowance of €1560
• Growth Budget - all employees get a yearly budget for external training of €1000, and one day off for growth per year (increase to two days in 2nd year)
• Recharge - with 31 vacation days annually (incl. one floating holiday), plus pro rata fully paid Fridays off during August
• Wellbeing - Monthly Wellbeing Allowance €35, from fitness to mental health, hobbies to relaxation
• Support - we’re offering a company pension scheme
• Health - The offices are equipped with fruits, drinks and snacks and ergonomic workplaces
• Team Building - Regular team and office events including the yearly Staffbase Camp
• Volunteers Day - you’ll get one day off per year for supporting a social project
• Employee Referral Program - one of your friends is a fit to one of our full-time openings? Refer them and get a referral bonus paid