Sr. 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 role sits at the intersection of engineering leadership and executive strategy — where your scope shifts from leading within a department to shaping engineering at the company level. You set strategic direction for the engineering organization, ensure that technology and organizational decisions are deeply aligned with long-term business outcomes, and serve as a senior executive partner to the VP of Engineering. Your focus is on designing the structures, people strategies, and technology investments that allow engineering to scale and thrive — not just today, but for years to come.
From here, you’ll have a clear path to VP of Engineering as your executive influence and organizational accountability grow.
What You’ll Do
Technical Leadership
- Drive company-level technical strategy, shaping multi-year roadmaps that align engineering investments with business priorities and long-term growth objectives.
- Serve as a key voice in high-stakes build, buy, and partner decisions — providing the strategic depth and organizational context that inform choices at the executive level.
- Identify and address systemic risks, process gaps, and capability shortfalls before they constrain delivery or culture.
- Represent engineering in cross-functional executive partnerships — ensuring technology is understood, valued, and treated as a strategic enabler across the organization.
- Own organizational design decisions that improve how engineering teams are structured, staffed, and operated at scale.
Knowledge & Standards
- Maintain deep technical credibility — understand architectural trade-offs, evaluate emerging technology trends, and apply them strategically against the specific context and constraints of Invitation Homes.
- Develop and apply expertise in organizational design, talent strategy, and team dynamics to build structures that scale effectively.
- Understand the business deeply enough to translate company goals into engineering strategy, and engineering constraints into language executives can act on.
- Stay connected to the external engineering community and industry trends to ensure the organization remains competitive and informed.
Communication & Collaboration
- Operate as a clear, trusted voice at the executive level — communicating strategy, trade-offs, risks, and results with confidence and precision.
- Connect technical decisions to business impact in ways that build credibility and earn organizational trust.
- Create alignment across leadership and engineering through transparent, consistent, and timely communication.
- Champion a communication culture within engineering that cascades clarity from strategy to execution at every level.
Leadership & Culture
- Develop Directors and senior engineering leaders — building a strong bench of technical and organizational leadership across the company.
- Own the talent strategy for engineering: hiring, developing, and retaining high-performing leaders and teams at scale.
- Set the cultural tone for engineering at the company level — model strategic thinking, accountability, empathy, curiosity, and continuous improvement.
- Partner with the VP of Engineering to shape the long-term vision for engineering and contribute to the broader technology leadership agenda.
- Serve as a steady, decisive leader in complex situations — resolve organizational conflicts, navigate ambiguity, and enable teams to move forward with clarity and confidence.
What You Bring
- 12+ years of professional software development experience, including significant experience leading engineering organizations at the department level or above.
- A demonstrated track record of setting technical strategy and organizational direction that delivers results at company scale.
- Proven ability to partner with executives across engineering, product, finance, and business operations to align technology investments with company strategy.
- A demonstrated track record of developing engineering directors and senior leaders, and growing a strong pipeline of technical and organizational leadership across a large organization.
- Clear, effective communication skills — written and verbal — with the ability to operate as a trusted voice at the executive level.
- A long-view perspective — you think in years, not quarters, and hold yourself accountable for engineering’s trajectory as much as its current output.
- 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.