Director of Engineering
Overview
GiveDirectly has delivered more than $1B in cash directly to 2+ million people living in poverty across 15 countries since 2011. We believe cash transfers are one of the most scalable, cost-effective, and dignified forms of aid, with the research to back it up.
Job Description
We’re hiring a Director of Engineering to build a best-in-class engineering department in a moment of rapid growth; we’ve more than doubled our engineering team in the last year and are continuing to hire.
Responsibilities
- - Own the engineering organization for our cash delivery platform: its structure, staffing strategy, and operating model
- - Own multi-year technical strategy for the platform: defining interfaces and boundaries between domains
- - Protect and scale the culture as we grow: open debate, product ownership, continuous improvement
- - Own engineering delivery — the commitments leadership and stakeholders plan against
- - Drive operational excellence, including on-call, incident response, code quality, testing, AI, and deployment practices
- - Represent engineering at the leadership level: translate technical realities into business decisions
- - Coach and develop engineers through 1:1s, feedback, career planning, and performance management
- - Set the technical quality bar: stay close enough to the technical work to weigh in on architecture
Required Skills
- - 5+ years managing engineers, including experience leading multiple teams or a larger engineering organization
- - 10+ years of overall industry experience building production software, with a strong backend foundation
- - Demonstrated ability to recruit, coach, develop, and retain engineers
- - Track record of building a strong engineering culture including candid, ego-free debate
- - Strong technical judgment driven by the mission, not ego
- - Energized to build product-development fluency in an organization that's relatively new to it
Benefits
- - Base Salary: $200,000
- - Bonus at Target Performance: 15% (~$30,000)
- - Estimated Total Compensation at Target: $230,000+
- - Annual Benefits Stipend: ~$33,427
About the company
GiveDirectly is a nonprofit organization that helps people living in extreme poverty by delivering unconditional cash transfers directly to recipients via mobile payments. Operating across countries including Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Bangladesh, the DRC, and the United States, GiveDirectly enables governments, foundations, and individual donors to move resources efficiently and transparently to those who need them most. By using technology to identify recipients, deliver payments end-to-end, and rigorously measure impact through randomized controlled trials, GiveDirectly is reshaping international development—putting choice and agency in the hands of recipients while building one of the most scalable, evidence-driven models in global aid.
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