Senior Director of Software Engineering (AI & Employee Journey)

At BambooHR, we’re all about setting people free to do great work, and we believe AI is a powerful partner in that mission. We’re leaning into intelligent tools to streamline our workflows, giving us more time for high-impact innovation. We look for curious, forward-thinking people who are ready to explore how AI can elevate their work and help us reimagine the future of HR.

Essential Job Duties

At BambooHR, the employee journey begins with hiring and continues through onboarding, performance, compensation, benefits, development and learning, rewards and recognition, and community. As Senior Director of Software Engineering, you will own engineering across this portfolio and transform these experiences into a coherent employee journey powered by applied AI. You will play a central role in realizing the full vision of Bamboo AI while delivering secure, reliable products that help people do great work. You will model BambooHR’s values and build a culture of ownership, learning, collaboration, and accountability.

You will:

• Own the engineering outcomes for the employee journey across multiple teams, proactively identifying the most important problems and building the path to solve them.
• Align Product, Technology, Customer Experience, and go-to-market leaders around a unified employee-journey strategy. Communicate tradeoffs, decisions, priorities, and risks clearly enough that teams and executives can act.
• Lead AI-native product development across the employee journey, turning customer problems into applied-AI experiences with measurable value.
• Transform how engineering teams build by establishing agentic practices that improve speed, quality, and learning.
• Turn decisions into reliable execution by establishing operating mechanisms, surfacing risk early, resolving cross-team dependencies, and staying with the work until it produces measurable results.
• Build a results-oriented leadership team of engineering managers and senior technical leaders, with clear accountability, strong judgment, and succession depth.
• Set the technical bar for architecture, quality, reliability, security, privacy, and technical health across the portfolio, making the tradeoffs required to modernize while continuing to deliver.

What You Need to Get the Job Done

• 15+ years of experience in software development and engineering leadership, including 5+ years in a Director-level or comparable leader-of-leaders role across multiple SaaS product teams.
• A demonstrated record of independently spotting important, ambiguous problems and owning measurable outcomes across organizational boundaries.
• Exceptional product and business judgment, including the ability to work backward from customer outcomes, make company-level tradeoffs, and decide what not to pursue.
• Fluency using AI in your own leadership work, with experience guiding engineering teams through an agentic transformation and sound judgment about where human review remains essential.
• Experience leading AI-native products from problem selection through production, with measurable customer value.
• Strong execution discipline, including turning strategy into priorities, owners, operating mechanisms, metrics, and reliable delivery.
• A record of developing results-oriented engineering managers and senior technical leaders who increased their judgment, scope, and organizational impact, while building leadership depth and succession coverage.
• Strong architectural and technical depth, with experience modernizing and operating secure, reliable SaaS systems at scale.
• Exceptional cross-functional and executive communication, with a record of aligning Product, Technology, Customer Experience, and go-to-market leaders around shared outcomes.
• A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

What Will Make Us REALLY Love You

• Experience in HR technology or adjacent employee-experience domains, especially benefits administration or payroll, including unifying fragmented product areas into a coherent customer journey.
• Experience building SaaS products for small and medium-sized businesses.