Director of Engineering - Dash

Dash is the most recommended software for recreation facility management, handling scheduling, memberships, and payments for facilities across North America. Dash is part of DaySmart, which builds industry-specific software for experience-based businesses — thousands of partners worldwide and dozens of industry awards. Position This is a player/coach role for someone who leads by example, combining hands-on technical contribution with proven people leadership. You'll spend your time building the engineering culture that will scale us through our next phase of growth, making architectural decisions, and writing code alongside your team. Responsibilities Define and lead the engineering vision and strategy, ensuring alignment with overarching business objectives and product roadmaps to drive sustained growth. Discover and align the technical improvement roadmap to ensure reliability, performance, and security. Partner with Product to build the one-year product roadmap. Use NPS and customer feedback data to find and prioritize the opportunities that most improve the customer experience. Streamline the loops between Customer Experience, Sales, Marketing, Product, and Engineering so customer signal reaches the team faster. Own delivery of the Dash platform from architecture through release, staying hands-on in the codebase and in design reviews. Build and scale a high-performing engineering team through strategic hiring and leadership development. Mentor, develop, and support your engineers with best practices, architectural guidance, and clear priorities. Set the delivery pace for a growth-stage team — prioritize ruthlessly, unblock your engineers, and hold the group accountable to committed timelines. Drive the architectural decisions and engineering standards that keep Dash reliable, secure, and scalable as transaction volume grows. Build a culture where engineers and product partners experiment, learn from failures, and ship measurable impact. Streamline CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices to accelerate release cycles, ensuring rapid, reliable, and high-quality software delivery. Infuse AI functionality within the product to delight our customers. Lead the shift to AI-first development — set tooling standards, run training and hands-on demonstrations, and track adoption across the team. Required Qualifications Technical Foundation 7+ years in software engineering, with deep PHP and Laravel experience and the judgment to work productively in a legacy codebase alongside modern services 5+ years managing engineering teams, preferably in growth-stage companies Strong experience with SQL, database optimization, and performance tuning Hands-on experience with AWS services, containerization (Docker), and Kubernetes Solid understanding of API design, system scalability, and microservices architecture Experience with task queues, asynchronous programming, and background processing Track record of building and scaling systems that handle high transaction volumes Leadership & Business Acumen Experience hiring, developing, and retaining high-performing engineers Proven ability to establish team processes and engineering practices that improve outcomes Strong communication skills with ability to influence technical and business decisions Experience in B2B SaaS environments, ideally with customer-facing systems Understanding of agile development practices and team facilitation Preferred Experience Early-stage startup experience Multi-product SMB environment Payment processing systems and PCI compliance requirements Team Topologies concepts and modern engineering organization structures Experience with incident response, postmortems, and reliability engineering Background in fitness, wellness, or service-based industry software The salary for this role is $200,000 - $220,000 per year. Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to education, work experience, certifications, internal equity, etc. What We Offer Competitive salary and benefits including medical, dental, vision, HSA, FSA, and more! 401k plan with company match on your contributions. Open PTO and a generous paid holiday schedule. Supportive work environment with the flexibility to work where/how you want – in-office, remote, or hybrid. Opportunities to ensure you are always learning and growing. How We Work This will be a US based remote position. We offer flexible work arrangements including fully remote, in person or hybrid opportunities. Wayne, PA Austin, TX Many DaySmart employees primarily work from home, and our teams are structured to operate efficiently in a distributed environment. While we don’t always share a physical office, we work together closely through remote collaboration practices. We maintain a highly collaborative culture and expect all employees to actively participate in meetings, discussions, and team interactions. This includes joining scheduled video calls with cameras on, contributing to conversations, and being fully present. We believe that strong communication and visual connection are essential to maintaining alignment, accountability, and trust across our teams. At DaySmart, working remotely comes with the responsibility to show up, engage, and collaborate with intention.