A line of code can take on many forms-the sublime UI, the intuitive interaction, the error that is never seen because the code was made to be fault-tolerant, or the automation of a manual task for our customers that would have taken hours before. However, none of that is possible without the ability to deliver that code to our customers as quickly as possible, while ensuring that what we are delivering is as robust and high-quality as possible.
As the Senior Director of Engineering, you will be at the very heart of BlackLine's engineering processes, dedicated to delivering high-quality software and features to our customers, both quickly and effectively. Your expertise, knowledge, and passion for your domain will imbue the organization around you; you will be a champion for code health, testability, maintainability, and best practices for development and feature delivery.

In this position, you will have the ability to build a world-class team who drives robust and high-quality feature-sets, well-formed and performant code that is maintainable and reusable, and engineering best practices for all of BlackLine's solutions to our customers. You will be a technical thought-leader, a champion for rigorous and adaptive technical design, architecture, proactive planning, performance/KPI monitoring, and SDLC concepts within the organization, focusing on cultivating a results and quality-first culture. By leading a team of cross-functional Back-end and Front-end Engineers, Scrum Masters, and Managers, you will be able to affect transformative change within the organization by focusing on best of breed development, rigorous testing and automation, cloud transformation, CI/CD, and qualitative delivery of BlackLine solutions.

At BlackLine, leadership is a powerful responsibility. We favor servant-leaders-those leaders who will support and enable their teams, guide them to continuous improvement and success, and who can proactively plan and successfully execute paths towards that success. In the right hands, with the right experience, our Directors can be a force that can change the very nature of how we work, and through that can drastically improve the working lives of each and every one of our clients.
Responsibilities:

• Deeply technical hands-on knowledge of SDLC, Design Patterns, Automation Testing, Agile Methodologies, CI/CD Concepts, best practices, and Cloud-based initiatives
• Provide technical and operational leadership, with a demonstrated ability to lead at all levels
• Ability to proactively anticipate challenges, and see around the corner for future obstacles
• Manage a team of Frontend and Backend Engineers, Scrum Masters, and Managers, focusing on effective prioritization of work while balancing quality and delivery, all in the clear focus of understanding our clients' needs and delivering solutions for those needs
• Lead and contribute to solutions for complex technical challenges related to developer and engineering productivity, quality assurance and controls, and delivery velocity
• Passionate about the technical and business opportunities that our customers' problems and needs present
• Maintain up-to-date knowledge of the application and business use cases, mentoring this knowledge throughout this position's direct reports
• Drive adoption and champion best practices in code health, sound architecture and design, testing (TDD/BDD), CI/CD, maintainability, and deliverability
• Oversee the development of platform capabilities, SaaS-based components and APIs, tools, processes, and other facets as needed in order to streamline development, reduce time to delivery, increase quality, and promote a culture of excellence within the organization
• Spearhead the development, integration, and lifecycle of mature engineering processes, suites, and tools, driving the application and organization to a modern, automated, and continually tested approach
• As needed, interface with external vendors or other 3rd parties and service providers, managing relationships and escalations
• Partner with peers both inside and outside of the department, working towards holistic improvements and success for the company and our customers
• Actively shape and mold engineering staff, coaching those who need additional growth or refinement, as well as managing those who are not performing as expected, always striving to have teams that are strong engineers who are accountable to each other and not just leadership
• Interact with Executive Management in order to understand corporate priorities and goals, as well as communicate technical subjects of interest or need in effective manners
• Contribute knowledge, skills, and personal qualities to a dedicated team of top engineers solving real-life problems in a bleeding-edge, high-performance, and high-volume environment
• Define and measure key metrics/KPIs highlighting engineering throughput, and the quality of shipped features
• Partner and collaborate with Technical Operations to ensure platform availability and performance
• Transform and drive superior Customer Service via improved quality, monitoring, and incident management capabilities

Qualifications:

• 10 or more years of experience in managing software engineering teams, internal infrastructure, developer tools, or distributed computing infrastructure
• 7 or more years of direct DevOps or Engineering Management, with hands-on leadership experience, including continuous builds and deployments, continuous integration, log collection and analysis, performance monitoring and tuning, as well as security
• 7 or more years of direct experience in Agile Methodologies, processes, and best practices
• Excellent leadership skills showing commitment, strategic foresight and planning, integrity, and moving the team and organization towards continual success
• Highly communicative leader who can reduce inefficiencies and ensure clarity
• Proven ability to mentor leaders within the organization to create additional leadership opportunities for staff, as well as allowing the ability to separate tactical vs. strategic thinkers
• Extensive prior hands-on technical experience with C# (preferred), C++, Java, Python, Go, or equivalent languages
• Strong knowledge of databases-both RDBMS and unstructured/NoSQL-as well as working knowledge of database scaling concerns and tools
• Experience working with distributed "big data" technologies and providers, as well as Machine Learning/AI technologies and providers
• Solid understanding of clustering, load balancing, and web caching technologies (e.g., CDN, memcached)
• Hands-on experience with modern source code versioning tools (e.g., git, mercurial)
• Prior hands-on experience managing the development of high volume/transaction SaaS applications
• Significant experience managing, growing, and successfully integrating high efficiency modern development methodologies into mainstream development processes and lifecycles

Education/Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related discipline, or equivalent experience
• A minimum of 10 years of experience with a significant subset of the following technologies: HTML, CSS, XML, SOAP/REST, Node, JavaScript, IIS, MSSQL, ADFS, PowerShell, WMI, Java, Apache, Tomcat, SSL, Go
• Recent experience in a Director-level role overseeing software engineering in large-scale organizations focused on Web Applications/SaaS
• 10 or more years of recent experience in supervisory positions, directing and managing employees either directly or through subordinate management staff
• Previous development experience and extensive knowledge of following: C#.ASP .NET, Node, JavaScript, MSSQL, performance optimization and tuning

Preferred

• Significant experience with modern open source platforms and technologies, as well as development methodologies and processes
• Proven track record of architecting, developing, implementing robust, distributed online solutions successfully
• Master's degree in Computer Science or related discipline
• Experience in guiding teams through Agile Transformations
• Experience working with and developing on major Cloud providers (e.g., Azure, AWS, GCP)
• Experience in Cloud Transformation initiatives