Director of Engineering - Collaborative Web Platform

About Pantheon

Pantheon brings together exceptional builders who take ownership, drive meaningful impact, and shape what's next for the web. We power more than 300,000 websites globally for organizations including Google, Princeton, Salesloft, Clorox, and the United Nations. Every day, thousands of developers and marketers use our WebOps platform to build, iterate, and scale WordPress, Drupal, and Next.js sites that reach billions of people worldwide. As an employer, we operate with the same philosophy that drives our product: foundation and freedom. Pantheon is a vibrant, remote-forward team of experts who care deeply about their craft and results. Here, you take ownership of work that matters, contribute alongside exceptional people, and see the impact you create.

The Opportunity

Pantheon is seeking a visionary and hands-on Director of Engineering to lead the team building the next generation of web content infrastructure. This is a rare opportunity to define the technical and organizational foundation of a zero-to-one product — a real-time, collaborative editing platform that is redefining how content teams create, manage, and publish on the modern web.

Content management has remained largely unchanged for two decades. Pantheon is uniquely positioned — with deep roots in the web platform, a global CDN, and a sophisticated branching model trusted by thousands of organizations — to build the collaborative content experience that the modern web actually deserves. This Director of Engineering will lead the team doing exactly that.

The Role

This role sits at the intersection of product leadership and technical execution. You will own the engineering organization for this product area: recruiting and developing engineers and engineering managers, setting the technical direction, and driving delivery from early-stage architecture through to a scaled, production platform. You will partner closely with product, design, and go-to-market to turn a compelling vision into a platform that developers and content teams love.

This is not a role for someone who prefers steady-state management. It is a role for a builder — someone energized by ambiguity, passionate about product craft, and capable of leading a high-performing team through the nonlinear work of inventing something new.

What You Need to Succeed 

Strategic & Organizational Leadership

• Define and execute the engineering strategy for the collaborative web platform, aligning technical investments with product milestones and long-term platform vision.
• Build, lead, and develop a high-performing team of engineers and engineering managers, establishing a culture of ownership, technical rigor, and continuous improvement.
• Partner with product and design leadership to translate vision into concrete engineering plans — breaking ambiguity into phased, deliverable roadmaps.
• Collaborate with executive leadership on resourcing strategy, headcount planning, and cross-functional dependencies.
• Represent engineering in go-to-market discussions, customer conversations, and partnership evaluations where technical credibility matters.

Technical Direction & Architecture

• Drive architectural decisions for the platform's core systems: real-time collaboration, branch-aware content state, API and integration layers, and visual editing infrastructure.
• Establish and champion engineering standards across the full stack — backend services, frontend systems, APIs, testing, observability, and deployment.
• Guide build-vs-buy decisions and technology selection with a clear framework for long-term scalability and developer experience.
• Maintain a strong technical point of view while remaining open to input — you will be a trusted thought partner for staff and principal engineers on the team.

Delivery & Operational Excellence

• Own end-to-end delivery accountability: planning, execution, quality, and iteration velocity across the team.
• Manage technical debt and modernization tradeoffs in a zero-to-one context where the right call is often to move fast — and occasionally to refactor deliberately.
• Establish the operational practices that will scale with the product: incident response, SLOs, deployment cadence, and on-call health.
• Drive recruiting and hiring for the team, in partnership with talent acquisition, ensuring a high bar for technical and cultural fit.

What You Bring to the Table

Experience & Technical Depth

• 12+ years of engineering experience, with 5+ years in senior engineering leadership roles managing teams of engineers and engineering managers.
• Proven track record of building and shipping products from early-stage through scale — ideally including at least one zero-to-one or platform-founding experience.
• Strong organizational builder: you have hired, developed, and retained excellent engineers, and you know what a high-performing team culture actually feels like.
• Experience leading full-stack product engineering teams, with genuine fluency in both frontend and backend concerns.
• Demonstrated ability to operate in a high-ambiguity environment — setting direction and maintaining team momentum without a complete map.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field; Master's preferred.
• Deep understanding of modern web platform architecture: APIs, real-time data synchronization, cloud-native services, and component-based frontend systems.
• Fluency in cloud infrastructure and deployment (GCP, AWS, or Azure), container orchestration, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Enough frontend architecture depth to credibly engage with engineers building visual editing experiences, component systems, and browser-side state management.
• Experience with distributed systems design — especially in contexts involving collaborative state, branching models, or event-driven data flows.
• Familiarity with CMS, developer tooling, or web publishing platforms is a meaningful plus.

Soft Skills

• Executive-level communication: you can make the technical accessible to non-technical stakeholders, and the strategic accessible to engineers.
• Strong written communicator — you write clear design docs, decision memos, and team updates without requiring editing.
• Effective cross-functional partner who builds trust and alignment with product, design, sales, and customer success peers.

What We Offer

We have all the usual perks and benefits but what we can really offer you is a fantastic work environment powered by an amazing team.

• Industry competitive compensation and equity plan
• Flexible time off, sick days, and 13 paid holidays
• Comprehensive medical insurance including Health, Dental and Vision
• Paid parental leave (plus fertility, adoption and other family planning benefits)
• In-office workspace (San Francisco & Chicago)
• Monthly allowance for wellness, reading and access to LinkedIn Learning for continued development
• Events and activities both team-based and company wide that inspire, educate and cultivate

Pantheon is an equal opportunity employer and we welcome applications from all backgrounds regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability, or any other classification protected by law. Pantheon complies with federal and local disability laws and makes reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation due to a disability for any part of the interview process, please contact talent@pantheon.io. Pursuant to local and federal regulations, Pantheon will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment.

After an offer is made and accepted, E-verify will be utilized to establish your identity and employment eligibility as required by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

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The US base salary range for this position in the United States is $216,000 - $270,000 USD per year. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. At Pantheon, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case.

Visa Sponsorship is not available at this time.