Director, Engineering

About the Role

You'll drive a multi-team technology strategy for a new product that enjoys Roon pedigree but projects new value to a wider 'music lover' audience by introducing new, inspiring capabilities. Partnering with senior leadership to shape the annual roadmap, set cross-functional priorities, and steward investments for long-term scalability and innovation, you'll lead and mentor a cross-functional team with a spectrum of experience. You will empower them to deliver high-impact solutions while ensuring alignment with business objectives and product vision. In this role, you'll also have to negotiate trade-offs between legacy and emerging technologies, resolve complex organizational challenges, and establish governance that optimize ROI and operational excellence. Your success will not be measured by the code you write, but by the culture of technical rigor, collaboration, and strategic impact you build; something that will undoubtedly influence a broader Roon organization.

Your Team

As the technology leader of an intrapreneurial startup with scale in mind, you'll hire and lead a cohort of engineers and functional experts, keeping these teams inspired, aligned, and accountable. You'll partner with business unit leadership to translate high-level objectives into clear technical roadmaps, set cross-team priorities and cadence, and define success metrics. Over time, by coaching and empowering other People Leaders, you ensure team growth and delivery against shared goals while maintaining high standards of quality, scalability, and innovation. In situations where product boundaries overlap (shared services or platform dependencies) you'll establish decision rights, hand-off processes, and shared success metrics to drive seamless collaboration and eliminate ambiguity across the Software Experiences portfolio.

What You Will Do

• Own the Technology Strategy for a New Product
  • Partner with SEBU and Roon executive leadership to define and evolve this new product's roadmap-balancing immediate feature delivery with long-term scalability, reliability, and ROI.
  • Establish and guide technical governance focused on the new product's platform, guiding trade-off decisions and resource allocation across iOS, Android, web, mobile, and backend services.
• Drive Innovation & Experimentation
  • Translate SEBU's business priorities into clear technical objectives for the new product-evaluating emerging technologies and piloting high-leverage experiments.
  • Build the ROI case for new investments in new channels for discovery, personalization, or other strategic areas, and shepherd successful pilots into production.
• Lead Through Your People Leaders
  • At inception, mentor and empower an experienced squad, and scale to include more ICs and functional leads, setting clear success metrics, removing organizational blockers, and instilling best practices in performance and reliability.
  • Foster a culture of data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement, ensuring each squad delivers high-impact, user-centric experiences.
• Coordinate Across the Software Experiences Business Unit
  • Work closely with a variety of stakeholders in SEBU to negotiate shared services boundaries, define decision rights, and codify hand-off processes for common platform components (e.g., authentication, analytics, playback engine, etc).
  • Serve as the escalation point for cross-product dependencies and integration challenges-ensuring new product and possible sibling products move forward without ambiguity or duplication.
• Measure, Communicate & Optimize
  • Define department-level KPIs (performance, uptime, velocity, engagement) for the new organization and report regularly to SEBU leadership-using data to steer investment and prioritization.
  • Act as a trusted advisor to the executive team, presenting well-reasoned technical insights and reinforcing this new product's position as an industry benchmark under the Roon brand.
• Anticipate Risks & Ensure Excellence
  • Proactively identify cross-domain risks-technical, operational, or organizational-and craft mitigation plans that align with SEBU goals.
  • Balance near-term deliverables with long-term architecture vision to inspire confidence and excitement among stakeholders.

What You Need to Be Successful

• Proven Expertise:
  20+ years of software development and leadership experience, with a strong record of delivering high-quality solutions in areas such as:
  • Cross-platform desktop and mobile application development.
  • User Interface engineering.
  • Databases and backend programming.
  • Networking and real-time communication.
  • Audio technologies and streaming systems.
  • Graphics, including real-time rendering or image processing.
  • Performance profiling, debugging, and optimization for scalable software solutions.
  • Experience evaluating and balancing legacy vs. new technology investments based on ROI and business impact.
• Technical Mastery:
  • Recognized as an internal technical expert with broad knowledge across domains and technologies.
  • Deep expertise in consumer-facing (B2C) software development.
  • Ability to anticipate and adapt to industry trends, driving the adoption of new technologies and practices.
• Leadership and Strategy:
  • Proven ability to blend product thinking with engineering know-how and market context to influence others and drive multi-disciplinary performance.
  • Proven ability to lead complex engineering projects and technical teams:
    • Experience in defining and implementing core engineering principles, processes, and standards across teams.
  • Strong decision-making skills, balancing immediate technical needs with long-term strategic goals.
• Communication and Influence:
  • Exceptional written and verbal communication skills to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.
  • Strong ability to build relationships with stakeholders and influence business direction and product priorities through technical insight and innovation.
  • Exceptional ability to lead and influence direct reports, including performance management and career and organizational planning.
• Passion for Innovation:
  • A track record of creativity and innovation in solving complex problems and delivering new products or services.
  • Deep interest in audio networking, streaming technologies, and crafting exceptional user experiences.

What Makes You Eligible

• Work remotely or from a HARMAN office
• Ability to travel up to 10%

• Successfully complete a background investigation and drug screen as a condition of employment