Director of Software Engineering

The Role: Spire is making a fundamental shift in how it operates its constellation. We are moving from a model where trained operators watch dashboards and escalate to experts, to one where the system is fully autonomous, self-healing, and data intelligent. This Director will lead that transformation. You will set the technical vision, define the architecture, build and inspire the team, and personally raise the standard for what modern space operations look like. The old model relies on operators, escalations, manual processes, and institutional knowledge locked in the heads of a few experts. It does not scale and it does not belong in a modern space company. We know what we want to replace it with: SRE principles applied to a constellation, autonomous fault handling, AI-driven anomaly detection, low toil, high data quality, and continuous improvement baked into the system. 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 Skills/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 performanc