Director of Engineering

About the Role

Invitation Homes set out to solve a real problem: home leasing options were limited and the experience for renters was inconsistent. Today, as the nation’s largest single-family home rental company, our engineering teams build the technology at the center of that solution — personalized resident experiences, service tools, and the operational systems that residents and associates depend on every day. When we ship, people feel it.

We’ve built an engineering culture that takes that responsibility seriously: collaborative teams, high standards, and a genuine investment in the people around you. Great software is built by engineers who are supported, growing, and proud of what they ship. This is where management leadership becomes genuine organizational leadership — what many organizations call a Director of Engineering. You are responsible for shaping how engineering operates as a function: not just what gets built, but how the teams that build it are structured, led, and grown. You partner with senior leaders across Product, Design, and Business Operations to ensure technology and strategy are deeply integrated at every level.

You’ve moved beyond developing individual managers to building the organizational structures, leadership practices, and culture that allow engineering to scale. Your leadership reach spans the department; your technical reach extends company-wide — you shape the architectural direction and technology strategy that affects the entire organization.

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

What You’ll Do

Technical Leadership

  • Shape the architectural direction and technical strategy for your department, ensuring alignment with company priorities and long-term business goals.
  • Serve as a key voice in build, buy, and partner decisions — providing the organizational context and technical depth needed to make sound choices at scale.
  • Identify and manage organizational technical risk: systemic gaps, architectural drift, and capability shortfalls that span teams or threaten delivery.
  • Guide vendor relationships and system integrations, ensuring technology partnerships deliver high value and appropriate risk assurance.
  • Establish and maintain technical governance across your department — standards, decision frameworks, and accountability structures that outlast any individual initiative.

Knowledge & Standards

  • Maintain technical credibility across your department’s technology landscape — enough depth to evaluate trade-offs, guide architectural decisions, and earn trust from your engineering leaders.
  • Apply principles of organizational design to structure teams effectively for growth, scalability, and sustained delivery.
  • Understand the financial dimensions of engineering: budget management, headcount planning, and ensuring organizational spend aligns with strategic priorities.
  • Develop a strong understanding of how engineering investments connect to business outcomes, customer experience, and competitive position.

Communication & Collaboration

  • Create alignment through transparent, strategic communication — connecting technical decisions to business outcomes for audiences at every level.
  • Communicate priorities, trade-offs, progress, risks, and results across the organization, including to executive leadership.
  • Build and maintain trust with leaders across Product, Design, Finance, Business Operations, and Vendor Management through consistent, well-reasoned communication.
  • Represent engineering’s perspective in company-level conversations — helping the broader organization understand and value the work of your teams.

Leadership & Culture

  • Coach and develop Sr. Engineering Managers and Engineering Managers, building a strong leadership bench across your organization.
  • Foster a generative, inclusive, high-performing culture where individuals and teams are empowered to innovate and deliver — felt at every level of your organization.
  • Make organizational design decisions that set your teams up for growth, resilience, and high performance.
  • Maintain accountability across your organization — for delivery, quality, culture, and the development of your leaders.
  • Champion automation and operational efficiency as organizational priorities — the teams that scale best are the ones that eliminate manual toil before it accumulates.
  • Maintain a bias to action at the department level — anticipate organizational risks before they surface, make the call, and keep engineering moving with clarity and momentum.
  • Serve as a steady decision-maker: bring the right voices into consequential decisions, make the call, and create alignment behind it.
  • Model strategic thinking, empathy, curiosity, and continuous improvement at every level of engagement.

What You Bring

  • 10+ years of professional software development experience, including significant engineering management experience.
  • A demonstrated track record of building and leading high-performing engineering organizations through layers of management.
  • Experience shaping technical strategy and architectural direction at a department or company level.
  • Demonstrated ability to partner with senior business, product, and design stakeholders to align technology and organizational strategy.
  • Clear, effective communication skills — written and verbal — with the ability to influence and build trust at the executive level.
  • Experience managing organizational budget, headcount, and vendor relationships in alignment with strategic goals.
  • A builder’s mindset — you measure your success by the health and growth of the people, teams, and engineering culture in your care.
  • Hands-on experience with cloud platforms, CI/CD practices, and modern iterative software delivery.
  • A degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Our Stack

Our engineering teams work with TypeScript, Node.js, React, PostgreSQL, and AWS — including Lambda, DynamoDB, and RDS. We practice CI/CD, favor infrastructure as code, and build on REST APIs and event-driven architectures. Salesforce is a significant part of our technology landscape — some teams build directly on the platform, while others integrate with Salesforce-managed APIs. Experience with these is a strong plus — though we care more about depth of thinking, adaptability, and the drive to keep learning than familiarity with any specific tool.

Progression Document