Director Engineering Jobs in Kent, WA (NOW HIRING)

The Grid Service and Platform Engineering team is looking for a highly motivated and collaborative Software Engineering Manager. This role involves leading the engineering of mission-critical, tier 0 service infrastructure, the foundational data platform that powers Smartsheet at scale. You will oversee services that handle millions requests per day, operate at 99.999% availability, and deliver low-latency, high-throughput performance for millions of customers worldwide.

We are an agile team that operates iteratively, focused on building high-quality software and adhering to rigorous operational best practices across complex, cross-functional distributed systems.

This full-time position reports to the Director, Engineering and can be located in our Bellevue, WA office, or you may work remotely from anywhere in the US where Smartsheet is a registered employer.

You Will:

• Manage one or more related teams of 6-10+ software engineers, driving development of tier 0 grid services and platform infrastructure that millions of customers depend on daily.
• Own and uphold 99.999% service availability targets across critical platform services, embedding reliability engineering, incident management, and on-call rigor into team culture.
• Help architect and guide technical vision to evolve low-latency, high-throughput service platforms capable of sustaining millions requests per day with predictable, consistent performance under load.
• Guide and mentor engineers on distributed systems architecture, scalability patterns, and platform best practices while leading design reviews for high-stakes system components.
• Lead cross-functional technical efforts spanning multiple upstream dependents, partner teams, and internal consumers, building alignment and resolving systemic dependencies across the organization.
• Plan and deliver complex, end-to-end infrastructure projects with high technical ambiguity, managing risks, communicating clearly to stakeholders, and building cross-team consensus.
• Drive SLO/SLA definition, capacity planning, performance benchmarking, and observability strategy across your platform services.
• Partner closely with product management, infrastructure, security, and other engineering pillars to shape technical roadmaps and contribute to long-range platform strategy.
• Hire exceptional engineering talent and grow your teams by attracting, developing, and advancing great engineers strategically across multiple teams.
• Mentor and coach both individual contributors and managers within and beyond your teams, identifying and developing potential successors.
• Own quarterly and annual technical and operational goals for your platform area, managing metrics, reporting, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Communicate effectively with executives and non-technical stakeholders, anticipating cross-team conflicts and proactively driving resolution.
• Champion AI adoption in both software and platform engineering lifecycles, leveraging shared learnings to improve operational efficiency and customer experiences.

You Have:

• 8+ years of software development, strong CS fundamentals (algorithms, data structures, distributed systems, systems design).
• 3+ years of engineering management, leading high-availability infrastructure/platform services.
• Proven track record owning and operating tier 0/mission-critical systems with five-nines (99.999%) availability.
• Hands-on experience building/operating low-latency, high-throughput service platforms (millions requests/day).
• Deep understanding of scalability, fault tolerance, and operational patterns for five-nines availability.
• Experience managing complex dependencies across distributed architectures.
• Strong CS fundamentals: distributed systems, concurrency, caching, data consistency, performance optimization.
• Experience building and scaling large-scale, cloud-native backend services (AWS or equivalent).
• Proficiency with observability: metrics, distributed tracing, alerting, and SLO/SLA management at scale.
• Experience productionizing services for multiple internal/external platform consumers.
• Demonstrated success building and scaling engineering teams (recruiting, onboarding, retaining senior/staff engineers).
• Experience with Agile/Scrum and iterative delivery on long-horizon infrastructure projects.
• Ability to balance engineering excellence with operational pragmatism.
• Communicates clearly and consistently with technical and non-technical audiences, including executive leadership
• Proactively surfaces risks, blockers, and status updates without prompting
• Provides direct, constructive feedback and supports engineer growth at all levels
• Plus: Experience building/managing full-stack teams.
• Plus: Exposure to AI/ML platform integration or AI-powered backend features.
• CS/Engineering degree or equivalent practical experience.
• Must be legally eligible to work in the US on an ongoing basis.