Director of Product Engineering at Nomad

DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT ENGINEERING WHY THIS ROLE EXISTS Nomad is building the financial and property management infrastructure for the largest, least-served class of entrepreneurs in America: small landlords. We already have: - A strong, highly autonomous team of engineers - A product customers rely on and value - Real traction and meaningful revenue This role exists to add leverage to a system that’s already working - helping us move faster, make better decisions, and scale intelligently. THE SHAPE OF THE ROLE This is a coach role managing engineers but at the seam of engineering and product. You’re here to: - Understand what’s working - Improve how we decide what to build, and how we build - Help a strong team operate high levels of clarity, speed, and impact - Note this role is leading Engineering (with a focus on product Engineering) but is not leading Product WHAT YOU’LL OWN You are accountable for outcomes over activity. 1. Product + engineering alignment - Help define what’s worth building and why, and how we build product - Bring rigor to opportunities: size, impact, tradeoffs, constraints - Push for clarity before execution - In engineering rooms, you may not be the deepest technical voice. In product rooms, you usually will and you find that asymmetry productive, not awkward. 2. Planning and execution quality - Lead strong shaping and planning for cycles - Identify risks early and force hard tradeoffs upfront - Improve consistency of shipping without adding drag 3. Team leadership and development - Support a highly autonomous team without micromanaging - Build trust, context, and alignment - Help engineers grow in ownership and capability 4. Cross-functional leadership - Translate complexity into clear decisions - Ensure engineers understand the “why” behind priorities - Collaborate deeply with product, growth, and operations 5. Technical engagement (without becoming the bottleneck) - Engage meaningfully in architecture, scoping, and risk - Ask good questions and surface tradeoffs - Trust the team’s context rather than prescribing solutions 6. AI evolution - Lead us to continually deepen our adoption of AI (paired with human judgement and taste) in how we build - Identify where AI meaningfully improves the product - Increase leverage of a small team WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR You likely: - Have been a strong engineer and moved into leadership, and maybe even product - Have led high-performing engineering teams at a startup or growth-stage company - Are product-minded and think in terms of business outcomes - Bringing rigor and shape to product ideas before they reach engineering, instead of letting them arrive as creative starting points engineers must reshape mid-build. - Know how to balance autonomy with alignment And: - You are low ego and collaborative - You are trusted by engineers and trust them in return - You can engage technically without needing to control every decision - You care about developer productivity, happiness, and efficiency - You have a point of view on how teams evolve from 5 → 10 → 20 engineers - You are AI-pilled but wise enough to leverage the right tool for the job   WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE (FIRST 6-12 MONTHS) - Great, clear engineering decisions (how we build and why) including scoping major builds - More consistent execution and fewer surprises during cycles - Strong trust across engineering, product, and leadership - Engineers feel supported, challenged, and growing - AI meaningfully increases team leverage THIS WILL NOT BE A FIT IF: - You don’t have years of leadership experience - You want to redesign the org before understanding it - You rely on heavy process to create alignment - You don’t enjoy concretely defining major new features given the system’s constraints - You need to be the smartest person in the room on every technical decision - You prefer large teams, clear layers, and well-defined roles - You haven’t worked in a small, fast-moving environment - You’re not genuinely interested in using AI to evolve how teams operate WHY NOMAD - A strong, ownership-driven team - A product customers already value - A large, complex problem space with real financial impact - Significant room to build - we’re early FINAL NOTE If your instinct is to earn trust, bring clarity, and help a strong team operate at a much higher level, we should talk. Location: Denver HQ (strongly preferred) Compensation: Compensation: $180,000 to $240,000 base salary, plus equity. For an exceptional candidate with the right startup scaling experience, we may stretch beyond this range.