Director of Engineering, Infrastructure & Technical Strategy - GIPHY

The Opportunity

We’re looking for a Director of Engineering to lead infrastructure strategy, cost and capacity management, vendor relationships, operational risk, and technical planning across GIPHY.

This role will partner closely with GIPHY's engineering managers and technical leaders across SRE/Data, Content, and Search/AI. The Director will focus on the broader technical, financial, operational, and partner-facing responsibilities that keep GIPHY scalable, reliable, cost-effective, and positioned for future growth.

The ideal candidate combines strong technical depth with clear communication, strong judgment, and a collaborative leadership style.

The Day to Day

• Own infrastructure and technical strategy across GIPHY, with a focus on scalability, reliability, maintainability, and cost.
• Monitor infrastructure spend, utilization, capacity, and commitments; identify opportunities to optimize cost and performance.
• Manage key vendor relationships, including AWS and other infrastructure, observability, search, AI, and IT providers.
• Support contract negotiation, renewal decisions, spend requests, and vendor evaluations.
• Partner with SRE and engineering leadership on reliability, incident response, operational readiness, and security risk.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and vendors through targeted prototypes and technical due diligence.
• Work with Product, BD, and external partners to understand scale, integration, and technical requirements.
• Represent Engineering in strategic partner and vendor conversations.
• Oversee GIPHY’s external IT support model and related vendor relationships.
• Partner closely with engineering managers and technical leads while complementing, rather than duplicating, day-to-day project and people management.
• Build alignment across teams, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and avoid unilateral decision-making.
• Value Product and cross-functional partners as part of defining priorities, outcomes, and execution plans.

What Success Looks Like

• Infrastructure spend and capacity are well understood and actively managed.
• Major technical, operational, security, and cost risks are identified early.
• Vendor relationships and contracts are proactively managed.
• New technologies are evaluated thoughtfully before adoption.
• Engineering teams have clear support and escalation paths without excessive dependency on any one person.
• Product, Engineering, BD, and leadership are aligned on major technical decisions and tradeoffs.

What You’ll Bring to the Role

• 10+ years engineering experience
• 5+ years of leadership and people-management experience leading engineering teams
• Engineering leadership experience in infrastructure, platform, distributed systems, search, AI, or large-scale consumer technology.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, reliability, observability, capacity planning, and cost optimization.
• Experience managing strategic technology vendors and contracts.
• Strong executive and cross-functional communication skills.
• Ability to evaluate unfamiliar technologies and make pragmatic build/buy/adopt/defer decisions.
• Collaborative, low-ego leadership style with strong judgment and accountability.

GIPHY

GIPHY sits at the intersection of personal communication and shared moments. GIPHY is the best way to search, share, discover and create GIFs on the Internet. The content on GIPHY's website, app, and API is all of the best and most popular GIFs on the web, along with content created by talented GIF artists and world-class brands. Our goal is to help make finding and sharing the good GIFs easier.

Shutterstock

Shutterstock connects diverse artists and creative professionals around the globe with the agencies, brands and people who need their work and services. It’s a place where creators come to be inspired and discover new ways to produce their best work. Shutterstock enables its employees to drive culture and tap into the world around them to develop the toolbox and solutions that help others share their world views. At Shutterstock, your ideas will be welcomed, your uniqueness will be celebrated, and you will be  supported in presenting your view of the world as you  experience it. We’re champions of resiliency;  quickly learning from our shortcomings in our pursuit of continuous growth.

At Shutterstock, we are committed to providing competitive pay and benefits that are in line with industry standards. The compensation package offered may vary depending on employment experience, skills, and knowledge. You may also be eligible for our generous benefits package including health, wellness and financial benefits (as applicable). Compensation ranges for candidates in locations outside of the location(s) below may differ based on the cost of labor, market, and additional factors.

The pay range for this position is below:
    • 140,000 - 160,000 EUR per year in Dublin

Note: Commission-eligible roles are expressed as on-target earnings (base and commission). Non-commission roles are expressed as base salary only but are also eligible for annual incentives.

#LI-MS1

#LI-Remote

 

Shutterstock Values

We are one team collectively focused on creating an unrivaled experience for our Customers and Contributors. Our Values represent the mindset of the employee who will thrive at Shutterstock.  If you are passionate about what you do, and want to become part of a cutting-edge technology company building industry leading products, please apply.

Shutterstock is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Suitably qualified and eligible candidates are encouraged to apply  regardless of age, color, disability, national origin, ancestry, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, veteran status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable law.

Shutterstock ensures that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment.  Persons with disabilities who anticipate needing accommodations for any part of the application process may contact, in confidence, [email protected].