Engineering Area Director

About Emplifi

Emplifi is the only Autonomous CX platform unifying social marketing, commerce, and customer care for more than 20,000 brands worldwide. Powered by Fuel AI, built on more than 5T of data, and recognized as a leader by leading industry analysts, Emplifi helps enterprise teams orchestrate connected customer journeys and deliver personalized experiences at scale, turning every customer touchpoint into a competitive advantage.

About the Team

You’ll lead engineering for Emplifi Publisher, our enterprise social media tool and a core part of our Autonomous CX platform. Publisher uses Fuel AI to automate content scheduling across channels, predict the best times to post, and write copy in multiple languages, all from a single dashboard. Behind it sits a governance layer with custom, multi-stage approval workflows, so global brands with complex regional teams can publish at scale without risking brand safety. That combination of AI, scale, and enterprise-grade workflows makes for interesting engineering problems.

You’ll report to our Chief Product and Technology Officer and work in a leadership trio with a Product Area Director and a UX Lead, who jointly own the area’s success. You’ll also work with other Engineering Area Directors and our Engineering Platform team.

About the Role

As Engineering Area Director, you're accountable for how your product area builds, runs, and improves its products. You'll set the technical direction, lead engineering managers and architects, and own delivery speed, quality, and reliability in production. You'll also bring AI-native ways of working into how your teams build. You'll lead through people, systems, and judgment, while staying close enough to the technology to make sound calls.

What You'll Do Here

• Define engineering and architecture strategy that supports the product direction
• Join product discovery early to shape solutions and flag technical risk
• Improve delivery speed, predictability, and release quality across your teams
• Own production health: reliability, security, incident response, and compliance
• Balance new product value against tech debt, operational work, and legacy complexity
• Introduce AI-native engineering practices, tools, and guardrails
• Lead, hire, and develop engineering managers, architects, and senior engineers
• Manage the area's engineering budget, including cloud, tooling, and headcount
• Collaborate with other areas on shared platforms, data, and standards

What You'll Bring to Us

• Significant engineering leadership experience in SaaS or enterprise software
• Experience leading multiple teams through engineering managers
• Strong technical and architectural judgment
• Experience owning production systems and operational quality
• A strong product mindset and focus on customer value
• A track record of improving delivery velocity and team effectiveness
• Confidence managing budgets, workforce planning, and tough people decisions
• Practical experience applying AI to software development
• A collaborative style that works well in a Product, Engineering, and UX trio