Being a Director of Engineering at IH

Job Description · Progression Document

You lead the leaders. Your direct reports are Engineering Managers. The lever has shifted from writing code to building the organizational conditions (the structure, culture, and leadership capacity) that let multiple teams operate well at once.

The scope is an operating group, not a pod. Success shows up in the quality of your managers, the alignment between engineering and business strategy, and the health of the organization beneath you. The work is further from the code than ever; the leverage is too.

Our systems touch residents in hundreds of thousands of homes: the app they use to pay rent, the portal for maintenance requests, the tools associates depend on every day. At this level, decisions about people, structure, and technical direction shape what those systems look like for years. When we get it right, people feel it.

(“Residents” are the people who live in our homes; “associates” are our employees.)

Camille Fournier, author of The Manager’s Path, describes a shift in perspective that catches many new directors off guard:

“Your first team is comprised of your peers at the leadership/executive level, and your reporting structure has now become your second team.” — Camille Fournier, The Manager’s Path

No two directors will look the same. The balance between technical oversight, organizational development, and executive engagement shifts depending on the size of your operating group, the maturity of your managers, and the strategic phase the company is in. What stays constant: the expectation that you hold the long view on both people and technology, and that you create the conditions for great work to happen at scale.

Strategy and Direction

Operating Group Leadership

Your operating group is led by a quad: you, your Product leader, your Design leader, and your Project Manager. Together, this group is the Strategy Tier, responsible for the 1–2 year outlook for the operating group: where it is going, what it will take to get there, and whether the organization is built to deliver it. Unlike at the pod level, where project management is often shared between the EM and Product Owner, the operating group has a dedicated Project Manager whose focus is coordinating delivery across pods, managing timelines and dependencies, and keeping cross-pod initiatives on track.

Each role has a distinct focus:

Product shapes the vision and roadmap for the operating group, prioritizing across pods based on business strategy and user need.

Design owns the research, interaction patterns, and experience consistency across the operating group’s product surface.

Project Management coordinates cross-pod delivery, manages program-level risks and dependencies, and keeps the operating group’s commitments tracked and visible.

Engineering — that’s you — provides technical direction, develops the leadership bench, builds a culture of craft and delivery, and is accountable for the health and quality of what the operating group ships.

Together, the quad owns not just the work but the conditions that make the work go well.

Technical Vision and Governance

You own the technical direction for your operating group. That means shaping architectural strategy, maintaining consistency of technical decisions across teams, and making sure what engineering builds today does not create expensive problems tomorrow.

Your technical credibility matters here. Not because you are reviewing every PR, but because you need enough depth to evaluate trade-offs, earn the trust of your engineering leaders, and ask the right questions in architectural discussions. Participate in Solution Architecture sessions, guide the curation of decision records, and make sure your teams’ technical choices align with the broader architectural direction.

You serve on the Architecture Advisory Board, the group that engages early on work that is particularly novel, complex, or cross-team. When a team is doing something for the first time, adopting a new technology, or building something that spans multiple systems, they bring it to the board before decisions solidify. This is not a bureaucratic checkpoint or ivory-tower oversight. It is a thinking partnership: a room where people with broad technical context help a team see around corners while options are still open. One useful frame for that work is the distinction between one-way and two-way doors. Two-way decisions can be revisited and reversed if they turn out to be wrong. One-way decisions cannot. The board’s most important work happens around the one-way doors, the choices that are hardest to undo and most worth getting right before the path closes.

When a significant decision affects more than one team, document it as a Decision Record. Context that lives in people’s heads leaves when they do.

You also own the quality bar for your operating group. Your managers hold it day to day; your job is to make sure they know what good looks like and feel that standard in the culture you build around them.

Alignment with the Business

Your technical strategy only works if it is aligned with where the business is going. Understand the company’s strategic priorities well enough to connect engineering’s roadmap to them, and to push back when they diverge.

Work with your Strategy Tier to maintain a realistic, frequently revisited delivery plan. Drive your EMs to surface unknowns early and turn them into knowns before they become delivery risks. Be a voice at the leadership table: able to present and discuss your work at all levels, including with executives.

Own the technology goals for your operating group. Set them clearly enough that your EMs can drive toward them, and hold the operating group accountable to results at the end of the year.

People and Organization

Our vision is to delight our residents and associates with innovative solutions built by happy teams. At the Director level, you carry more responsibility for the “happy teams” part than anyone else in the organization. You are expected to live our engineering principles and build a culture where they are felt across your operating group, not just declared. Culture at scale does not emerge on its own. It is built deliberately, through the managers you develop and the norms you model.

Building the Leadership Bench

Developing your Engineering Managers is the work that shapes the organization’s future. Coach them on the things that are hardest to learn alone: navigating ambiguity, giving difficult feedback, building trust with their teams, and thinking beyond their own pods. Build the next generation of leaders who can step into larger roles as the organization scales.

Skip-level conversations are essential at this level. They are your signal on what your managers’ teams are actually experiencing, not just what surfaces in weekly updates. Use them to stay close to what the work is actually like.

Organizational Design and Staffing

Think two moves ahead on staffing. Understand where the organization’s current composition is strong and where it is fragile, and take steps to address weaknesses before they become delivery problems.

Organizational structure is a lever. The way teams are shaped affects how they communicate, what they can own, and how fast they can move. Make organizational design decisions with growth, resilience, and delivery in mind.

Work with HR and recruiting to build diverse, capable pipelines. The best time to address an organizational gap is before you feel it.

You own the budget for your operating group. Keep headcount, tooling, and vendor costs aligned with strategic goals, and advocate for the resources your teams need to do the work well.

Execution at Scale

Delivery and Alignment

Your focus is across teams, not within them. Watch for divergence in solution choices, technical direction, and engineering practices. When you find it, create the conversations that produce alignment.

Use the Tableau Agile Metrics Reports for delivery signals and the DX platform for the complementary picture: how engineers feel about their work and how the organization’s DORA metrics are trending. The goal is not to manage by numbers. It is to understand what they are telling you and act before small problems compound.

The weekly Senior Leadership meeting includes an operational review of each operating group. Come prepared to speak to the signals emerging from your teams: what the metrics show, what is behind them, and what you are doing about it. That visibility is how leadership stays calibrated and how you build trust at the table.

AI coding assistants are changing what engineers can do and how fast. Stay close enough to the work to understand what your teams are adopting, set expectations around responsible use, and make sure the productivity gains are real and not just noise in the metrics.

Bias to Action

Keep the organization moving. Anticipate risks before they surface, make the call when clarity is needed, and resolve ambiguity quickly. Confusion at your level multiplies downward. The faster you create clarity, the more momentum you preserve across the organization.

Communication and Influence

At this level, you are as much a translator as a decision-maker. You convert engineering reality into terms that resonate with executive leadership and business partners. You bring business context back to engineering in ways that help your managers and their teams understand not just what they are building but why it matters.

Build strong relationships with peers across Product, Design, Finance, Business Operations, and Vendor Management. These partnerships are how engineering and business strategy stay aligned. The Vendor Management relationship matters especially around third-party integrations and system dependencies: stay close to those conversations and bring a clear engineering perspective to capability and contract decisions.

Speak up when you disagree. Your voice matters at this level, and holding back a concern can affect the whole operating group. Once a decision is made, commit fully and create alignment behind it. That combination of honest advocacy and full commitment is how organizations operate with integrity and speed.

From here, you’ll have a clear path to Sr. Director of Engineering as your strategic influence and organizational scope grow.