Director of Software Engineering

Director of Software Engineering

Spire

Glasgow, United Kingdom

What This Role Is Not:

This is not a role for someone who wants to graduate out of technical work. If your ideal week is back-to-back 1:1s, sprint ceremonies, and stakeholder syncs, this is not the right fit. We need a director who writes code, reviews architecture, challenges technical decisions, and earns the team's respect through demonstrated craft and not just tenure or title.

What You Will Work On:

Technical Leadership

• Define and own the technical roadmap for autonomous constellation operations;
• Set the architectural direction for the data platform, reliability systems, and automation infrastructure;
• Stay hands-on: review code, prototype solutions, and get into the details when it matters;
• Establish engineering standards across code quality, system design, testing, and observability, and hold the team to them;
• Be the person engineers come to when the problem is genuinely hard.

Team Building & Culture

• Recruit, develop, and retain a team of 6 to 10 world-class reliability and platform engineers;
• Set the pace, tone, and ambition for the team and make being on it feel like a privilege;
• Create an environment where engineers grow fast, own their work, and ship things they are proud of;
• Identify gaps and level up engineers through mentorship and not just management.

Operational Transformation

• Lead the shift from manual, operator-driven processes to fully automated and self-healing operations;
• Define and drive toward SLOs, error budgets, and reliability targets for the constellation;
• Partner with satellite operations and mission teams to translate pain into software solutions.

Cross-Functional Influence

• Be the technical voice of the team in company-wide conversations about architecture, infrastructure, and platform strategy;
• Influence how Spire thinks about automation, data, and AI/ML across the broader engineering organization.

Basic Qualifications:

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 in a technical leadership or staff-level individual contributor role;
• Demonstrated track record building and shipping reliable production systems at scale. You have owned things that could not go down;
• Deep technical credibility. Engineers on your teams have respected your judgment and not just your title;
• Experience with SRE principles, reliability engineering, or large-scale automation. You have reduced toil systematically and not just complained about it;
• Strong foundation in Python, distributed systems, data platforms, and cloud infrastructure;
• Experience hiring and developing engineers. You know what great looks like and how to find it;
• The communication and influence skills to drive technical decisions across teams you do not directly control.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience applying AI/ML or advanced analytics to operational or monitoring problems;
• Experience writing performance software in Rust;
• Background in space systems, aerospace, or highly constrained real-time environments;
• Experience building data lakes, telemetry platforms, or observability infrastructure at scale;
• A history of leading teams through technical transformations and not just maintaining the status quo.