Director of Engineering

Who We Are

We started our company to help others launch and run their own businesses, at any stage. The way we help is by keeping it simple and supporting entrepreneurs one step at a time. Put simply: our mission is to enable anyone to start, run, and grow their business while avoiding the common pitfalls that derail hopeful entrepreneurs. No more having to wade through forms, taxes, or ongoing state compliance. 

We are a remote company based in Austin, Texas. We have team members from Florida to Oregon and all points in-between. Take pride in your work knowing that it shapes how people all across the country reach their goal of starting, running, and growing their business.  

If the idea of helping people and working with a genuinely caring, supportive team excites you, then you’ve come to the right place.

The Role

We are looking for a Director of Engineering to lead our Enterprise Platform and Integrations team. This leader will be responsible for the people, platforms, and delivery practices that power our external partner integrations and connect partner experiences to ZenBusiness’s formation, compliance, pricing, and fulfillment capabilities.

This role combines engineering leadership with strong integration responsibilities. The Director will lead a pod of engineers, establish the technical strategy and evolve our Platform into a clear set of domain-aligned capabilities exposed through stable APIs, event , hosted domain services, agent ready tools  and work closely with Product, Business Systems, Operations, and external partners to deliver reliable, scalable solutions.

The ideal candidate is a strong people leader who understands modern API architecture and can translate business and partner needs into sustainable technical solutions.

Responsibilities

Engineering and People Leadership

• Lead, coach, and develop the engineers supporting Platform APIs and partner integrations. 
• Create clear ownership, expectations, and development opportunities across the team.
• Establish effective engineering practices for planning, design reviews, code reviews, testing, deployment, documentation, and production support.
• Partner with Product and business leaders to build realistic roadmaps and make clear tradeoffs across partner commitments, platform investments, technical debt, and team capacity.
• Support hiring, onboarding, performance management, and succession planning for the team.
• Build a culture of accountability, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.

API and Platform Strategy

• Define the technical vision and roadmap for ZenBusiness’s Enterprise APIs and integration capabilities.
• Lead the design and evolution of APIs, schemas, webhooks, authentication, fulfillment packages, and supporting developer tools.
• Ensure APIs are scalable, secure, observable, well documented, and easy for partners to adopt.
• Establish standards for API versioning, backward compatibility, change management, deprecation, and release communication.
• Reduce partner-specific customizations by developing reusable platform capabilities and consistent integration patterns.
• Partner with internal platform teams to connect Enterprise APIs to formation, compliance, pricing, order management, schemas, and fulfillment workflows.
• Lead through influence across engineering teams whose systems contribute to the end-to-end partner experience, establishing clear ownership and resolving cross-team dependencies.
• Evolve core business capabilities so they can be safely discovered and invoked by AI agents through MCP and other emerging standards, with clear authorization, observability, guardrails, and human oversight.

Partner Integrations

• Represent ZenBusiness in senior-level technical conversations with strategic partners to understand their architecture, requirements, constraints, and implementation plans, while clearly communicating decisions, risks, dependencies, and delivery expectations.
• Guide partners through solution design, testing, and launch. Establish clear launch-readiness criteria and lead technical go/no-go decisions, production stabilization, and ongoing integration health.
• Translate partner needs into platform capabilities while protecting the long-term integrity of the architecture.
• Identify integration risks early and create clear mitigation and escalation plans.
• Coordinate across Product, Engineering, Sales, Partner Success, Operations, Legal, Security, and Finance when delivering new partner capabilities.
• Ensure partner commitments, dependencies, ownership, and launch criteria are clearly documented and understood.

Delivery and Operational Excellence

• Own the reliable delivery of API and integration roadmap commitments.
• Improve release processes for schemas, fulfillment packages, portal updates, changelogs, and production deployments.
• Establish service-level objectives and operational metrics for API availability, latency, errors, webhook delivery, data accuracy, and partner adoption.
• Strengthen monitoring, alerting, incident response, and root-cause analysis for partner-facing services.
• Ensure production incidents and partner escalations receive clear ownership, communication, and follow-through.
• Use operational data and partner feedback to identify platform improvements and prioritize investments.

How You’ll Work

You will work closely with:

• Product leaders for Enterprise, Formation, Compliance, Pricing, and Fulfillment
• Business Systems and Operations leadership
• Enterprise and API engineers
• Architecture, Security, Infrastructure, AI Platform, and Data teams
• Sales, Partner Success, and Implementation teams
• Strategic external partners and their technical teams

What Success Looks Like

Within the first 6–12 months, this leader will:

• Establish clear ownership, operating practices, and career development plans for the API pod.
• Build a prioritized technical roadmap that balances partner delivery, reliability, scalability, and technical debt.
• Improve the predictability and quality of API, schema, and integration releases.
• Establish measurable standards for API reliability, webhook delivery, integration health, and incident response.
• Improve partner onboarding through stronger documentation, reusable patterns, testing tools, and launch processes.
• Reduce integration defects, production incidents, and partner-specific engineering work.
• Develop trusted relationships with strategic partners and internal stakeholders.
• Create a scalable integration model that supports future formation, compliance, pricing, and fulfillment products.

Qualifications

• Significant experience leading software engineering teams, including managing and developing engineering managers and/or senior engineers.
• Experience designing, building, or operating external APIs and enterprise integration platforms.
• Strong understanding of REST APIs, webhooks, event-driven architecture, authentication, API gateways, versioning, and integration security.
• Experience delivering complex integrations involving multiple internal systems and external partners.
• Demonstrated ability to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Strong understanding of software delivery, testing, observability, incident management, and production operations.
• Experience managing technical roadmaps, dependencies, risks, and cross-functional delivery.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate technical decisions to nontechnical audiences.
• Experience participating in customer- or partner-facing technical conversations.
• Ability to balance urgent partner needs with long-term platform health.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building developer portals, integration sandboxes, API documentation, SDKs, or partner certification programs.
• Experience supporting high-volume, business-critical integrations.
• Familiarity with schema-driven platforms, API lifecycle management, and automated contract testing.
• Experience leading teams through platform modernization or the migration of legacy integrations.
• Experience working in a product-led, SaaS, or platform organization.
• Experience leading complex, partner-facing enterprise integrations, including direct communication with senior product and engineering leaders at external companies.
• Strong prioritization and stakeholder-management skills, especially when contractual or launch commitments compete with internal platform investments, operational needs, and technical debt.
• The ability to move between executive-level conversations and detailed technical or delivery decisions without becoming either a purely strategic leader or the team’s day-to-day solution architect.

Leadership Profile

We are looking for a leader who:

• Develops people and creates clarity without becoming a delivery bottleneck.
• Is technically credible but does not need to be the person writing every solution.
• Can move comfortably between architecture, execution, operations, and partner conversations.
• Makes pragmatic decisions while protecting long-term platform scalability.
• Communicates risks and tradeoffs early and clearly.
• Builds strong relationships across technical, product, operational, and commercial teams.
• Treats documentation, reliability, and knowledge sharing as essential parts of engineering.

Compensation:

Compensation Range: $215,200 - $269,000

We believe in transparent and equitable compensation practices. The range listed above reflects the typical range for this role based on experience, skills, and market. Individual compensation decisions are made thoughtfully and may vary based on qualifications and business needs. 

Our total rewards package includes competitive benefits, paid time off, equity, and additional programs designed to support employee well-being and growth.

Remote Culture. A great company culture leads to happy employees, and happy employees lead to happy customers. We provide our employees with good salaries, benefits, equity, and interesting challenges that have a positive impact. 

Let’s stay connected! We believe in staying connected, and we have a weekly “All Hands” meeting every week. We also have a social committee that hosts frequent events. We’ve held a virtual talent show, costume competitions, monthly lunch and learn series, Hackathons and more! 

Benefits.  The company offers various benefits to employees and their dependents, including medical, vision, dental, disability, and life insurance, as well as parental and military leave. Other benefits include an employee assistance program, 401k + match, annual bonus, pet insurance, and RSUs. Paid parking* and 10 paid holidays are also provided. 

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. We believe in diversity, equity & inclusion. At ZenBusiness, every voice counts no matter your race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, location, or background. We celebrate the diversity of our teams, knowing that our products, services, and customers thrive best when we lean into and celebrate our differences.

Please check out our careers' page to learn more about our culture, benefits, and open opportunities.

*applicable to in-office employees