Director of Engineering

Standard Template Labs is a stealth-mode, AI-native startup reimagining the future of IT Service and Configuration Management. Backed by leading investors, we're leveraging AI, graph-based architecture, and exceptional design to transform how enterprises manage and engage with their technology ecosystems.

About the Role
We’re seeking a seasoned engineering leader who combines strategic vision, hands-on coding, and a deep appetite for applying AI to real-world product challenges. You’ll lead and elevate our engineering team while staying deeply engaged in architecture, system design, and implementation. At the same time you’ll drive the integration of AI/ML capabilities across our product stack and infrastructure, enabling our platform to anticipate, automate, and scale in novel ways.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the engineering team: hire top talent, set clear objectives, mentor senior engineers, and build a high-performance culture of innovation and collaboration.

• Define and execute the technical roadmap: refine our architecture, establish coding standards, drive tight alignment between product strategy and engineering deliverables.

• Stay hands-on: roll up your sleeves with code, system design, reviews, proofs-of-concept, and infrastructure optimizations. You’ll balance leadership with doing.

• Embed AI across our stack: identify opportunities for generative AI, ML inference, data-driven feature enhancements, workflow automation, and tooling to improve developer and end-user productivity.

• Partner closely with product, design, data science, and operations: ensure the engineering output supports strong user experiences, scalable systems, low latency, high availability, and robust observability.

• Champion best practices for AI and data: establish frameworks for experimentation, model deployment, monitoring, bias mitigation, and lifecycle governance.

• Drive engineering excellence: ensure code quality, reliable CI/CD pipelines, architecture reviews, performance tuning, cloud-native deployments, and security/compliance readiness.

• Measure and improve: define engineering KPIs, set meaningful targets, review results frequently, and continuously iterate to drive efficiency, output, and team health.

Qualifications

• Strong track record of building and shipping complex systems—ideally SaaS or enterprise-scale products—with significant engineering ownership.

• Hands-on experience with modern AI/ML: applying models in production, integrating generative AI or inference pipelines, understanding data infrastructure, feature engineering, model lifecycle, and tooling.

• Deep technical breadth: you know how to architect scalable systems, work with microservices, cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), infrastructure as code, performance optimization, and devops/CI-CD pipelines.

• Strong product and user focus: you’re comfortable bridging engineering and product, translating user needs into engineering deliverables and measurable business value.

• Leadership & culture-builder: you’re passionate about growing teams, mentoring engineers, establishing standards and engineering best practices, and building an inclusive, high-trust environment.

• Excellent communicator: you can distill complex technical trade-offs for stakeholders, collaborate cross-functionally, and drive alignment.

• Bonus: experience in AI ethics, ML ops, large language models (LLMs), automation of developer workflows, or building internal AI toolchains.

What We Offer

• Build foundational product features for an AI-first enterprise platform.

• The opportunity to take ownership of critical systems that scale to millions of users.

• A culture that values craftsmanship, autonomy, and technical excellence.

• Competitive compensation, equity, and benefits package.

• Work from our Flatiron District, Manhattan office, where you’ll be side-by-side with the founding team in a supportive, collaborative setting. Our team works on-site five days a week, growing and building together, and the location is easy to reach with plenty of public transportation options.

As an equal opportunity employer, we don’t tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind. Whether that’s based on race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, veteran status or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state or local laws.