Director of Engineering, Data Platform
Pendo · Raleigh, NC
About this role
## The team + the role Pendo’s **Data Platform** is the backbone of everything we do—processing **50B+ events per day** (peaking at **1M+ events/sec**) and managing **dozens of petabytes** across multiple production environments. The platform powers **real-time ingestion**, **batch processing**, and **analytics at scale**, along with the **instrumentation standards** that keep our codebase observable. Built primarily in **Go**, running on **Google Kubernetes Engine**, and relying on **Cloud Pub/Sub**, **Firestore**, **Google Cloud Storage**, **Redis**, and **memcache**. We expect the stack to evolve—and you’ll help decide how. We’re looking for a **Director of Engineering** to lead the teams that own this infrastructure. This is a leadership role with real technical depth: you’ll set strategy, build and grow high-performing engineering teams, and partner closely with **Site Reliability Engineering**. You’ll stay close enough to the code to review designs, debug production issues, and contribute when it matters. You’ll also own the **economics** of running the platform at this scale and serve as a trusted voice with customers on **performance, data integrity, and reliability**. **Location:** Raleigh, NC (hybrid). **In-office 3 days/week.** --- ## What this looks like day-to-day - Lead multiple engineering teams responsible for **real-time data ingestion**, **analytics batch pipelines**, and an **analytics query engine**—setting technical direction and roadmap while balancing near-term delivery with long-term **scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency**. - Drive architectural decisions across **storage, compute, and data modeling**; know when to adopt, build, or retire technologies and make those calls with clear rationale. - Own **instrumentation standards** across the core codebase (structured logging, **OpenTelemetry metrics and tracing**), ensuring adoption across the org with minimal friction and telemetry that’s useful, consistent, and cost-conscious. - Own the **cost profile** of the data platform at petabyte scale: forecast infrastructure spend for new initiatives, improve cost attribution by customer/product/feature/team, and diagnose/resolve cost overruns quickly. - Partner with **SRE** on shared on-call responsibilities, incident response, postmortems, and reliability roadmaps; define and track **SLOs** for ingestion latency, query performance, and data correctness. - Serve as a technical authority in customer conversations on platform performance, data integrity, and reliability—translating needs and escalations into engineering priorities. - Hire, coach, and develop engineering managers and senior engineers; build a culture grounded in high standards, clear communication, and continuous improvement. --- ## Who you are - **A builder, not a maintainer**: you’re energized by ambiguity and define the path forward. You operate as a technical owner—making architecture, cost, and reliability tradeoffs visible before they become crises. - **AI-curious (genuinely)**: you evaluate emerging tools with sound judgment, separate meaningful shifts from hype, and guide adoption of AI-assisted/agentic practices in a way that raises the bar without adding risk. --- ## Must-haves - Several years of engineering management experience, including managing managers or multiple teams; proven ability to build high-performing teams in a high-growth SaaS environment. - Experience building and operating **large-scale, data-intensive distrib
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