Senior Director, Engineering - ICM

About CaptivateIQ CaptivateIQ is transforming the way companies plan, manage, and optimize sales performance.

We started with incentive compensation management and are now expanding our platform to solve broader enterprise performance management challenges. Recognized by analysts like Gartner, Forrester, and G2 and backed by investors including Sequoia, ICONIQ, Accel, and Sapphire Ventures, we help high-growth companies like Netflix, Figma, and Stripe drive revenue performance with flexibility and insight. We’re building a category-defining platform at the intersection of finance, sales, operations, and AI. We’re looking for ambitious builders to help shape what comes next. About the Role As Senior Director of Engineering for Incentive Compensation Management (ICM), you’ll lead the engineering organization behind our flagship product that customers rely on to pay their teams accurately and motivate performance. You’ll lead managers across multiple teams and set the technical direction for making ICM AI-native without compromising the accuracy and trust our customers depend on. This role combines product thinking, technical leadership, and organization building. You’ll partner closely with Product, Design, GTM, and executive leadership to turn ambiguous opportunities into scalable products, and you’ll shape the engineering culture and structure that delivers them.

The Problems You’ll Solve - Making ICM AI-native. Decide where AI creates real customer value in plan design, calculation, and payout workflows, and build the quality and evaluation practices that make those features trustworthy.

- Scaling a system where correctness is non-negotiable. Customers pay real people based on our calculations. You’ll balance speed of delivery with reliability, performance, and data integrity at enterprise scale.

- Evolving the organization with the product. You’ll develop managers, clarify ownership, and adapt structure and process as the product matures.

What You'll Do Set the strategy

- Own the engineering strategy for ICM, aligned with company priorities, customer needs, and long-term platform direction

- Identify new opportunities and guide product evolution, including the thoughtful application of AI to create differentiated customer workflows

Lead the organization

- Recruit, grow, and inspire engineering managers and senior technical leaders

- Build a culture of ownership, velocity, and continuous improvement

- Design team structures and processes that evolve with product maturity

Raise the technical bar

- Guide architecture decisions that balance speed, scalability, reliability, and maintainability

- Stay close enough to the work to spot risks, challenge assumptions, and raise quality across the organization. You don’t need to write production code, but you do need to earn the respect of the engineers who do.

Drive execution

- Create alignment and clear priorities across Engineering, Product, Design, and GTM

- Make thoughtful tradeoffs and help teams move quickly while holding a high quality bar

What You'll Bring - 15+ years of software engineering experience, including 6+ years leading managers and multi-team engineering organizations

- A track record of building and scaling high-performing teams

- Experience owning products end to end and scaling existing systems

- Hands-on experience shipping AI/ML-powered product features, ideally LLM-based, including how you measure and maintain their quality. Experience applying AI to improve how engineering teams work is a plus.

- Strong technical instincts across product architecture, infrastructure, reliability, and developer experience

- A close partnership with Product and Design, and a focus on customer outcomes beyond engineering

- The ability to create clarity for teams in fast-moving, ambiguous environments

- Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, including experience working with executive leadership

Nice to have: Experi