Director, Software Engineering

About ZOLEO and Our Mission

ZOLEO is revolutionizing safety beyond conventional communication methods. Originating as a hardware-centric connectivity system, it has grown into a dependable safety and monitoring platform designed to provide reassurance globally. Our platform serves both field users and their safety contacts, offering a trustable ecosystem with smart automation to ensure timely assistance when it counts most.

Role Purpose and Importance

The Director of Software Engineering will oversee the delivery and operational excellence of product engineering teams, managing Team Leads and engineers to convert strategic goals into consistent, reliable product releases. This leadership role works closely with CTO and senior leaders, steering the engineering function’s growth and effectiveness in a cutting-edge AI-driven environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end software delivery operations, coordinating across multiple teams to manage capacity, dependencies, and risk mitigation.
• Supervise and mentor Team Leads and engineering managers, fostering growth, performance, and team well-being.
• Drive hiring, onboarding, and leadership bench-strengthening efforts as the team expands.
• Implement robust engineering practices such as delivery cadence, quality assessment, incident retrospectives, automated testing, observability, and release protocols.
• Champion AI-augmented engineering workflows, ensuring their secure, pragmatic, and value-driven use in development and testing phases.
• Collaborate extensively with Product and Technology leadership to align priorities, capacity, architecture standards, and function evolution.
• Manage engineering tools, cloud and model usage, contractor budgets, and related vendor relations, enforcing security, access control, training, and compliance.

Candidate Profile and Qualifications

• Proven experience leading multiple software engineering teams and managing engineering leadership roles with hands-on people management.
• Expertise in translating strategic objectives into executable plans with a strong focus on delivery reliability and risk awareness.
• Demonstrated success in recruiting, mentoring, evaluating, and developing engineers and leaders, fostering inclusive and high-performing cultures.
• Strong technical acumen for evaluating design, architecture, trade-offs, and execution risks.
• Solid background in enhancing engineering processes such as planning, service ownership, incident analysis, testing regimes, CI/CD, monitoring, backlog management, and delivery metrics.
• Experience adopting and guiding AI coding tools and agent workflows while emphasizing ethical and practical benefits.
• Effective cross-functional communication skills with product and technical stakeholders balancing multiple priorities.
• Accountability in managing budgets, vendor relationships, contractor resources, and tooling with sound decision-making.
• Asset: experience with mobile, cloud, connected devices, safety-centric products, organizational scaling, or Team Lead management models.

Compensation and Benefits

• Annual base salary band between 200,000 and 220,000 CAD.
• Hybrid working arrangement balancing team collaboration and lifestyle flexibility.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and tailored flexible spending benefits.
• Paid vacation and sick leave to support well-being.
• Professional development funds for continuous learning.
• Inclusivity-focused workplace with a commitment to diversity.

Additional Information

Our recruitment process may involve AI-assisted screening alongside human evaluation. We encourage candidates meeting approximately 70% of qualifications to apply as inclusivity is a priority. Reasonable accommodations during recruitment are available upon request to ensure an accessible experience.