Director, Engineering - Compute Platform

Fastly helps people stay better connected with the things they love. Fastly’s edge cloud platform enables customers to create great digital experiences quickly, securely, and reliably by processing, serving, and securing our customers’ applications as close to their end-users as possible — at the edge of the Internet. The platform is designed to take advantage of the modern internet, to be programmable, and to support agile software development. Fastly’s customers include many of the world’s most prominent companies, including Vimeo, Pinterest, The New York Times, and GitHub.

We're building a more trustworthy Internet. Come join us.

Director, Engineering - Compute Platform

Fastly’s Compute Platform is the ultimate flexible edge-compute platform. Our unique serverless platform scales workloads globally, without our customers lifting a single finger to manage their edge infrastructure. In partnership with the WebAssembly community, we’re developing new ecosystem capabilities and expanding first-class programming language and tooling support for Fastly’s Compute Platform.

We are looking for a passionate and innovative Engineering Director to lead the teams responsible for building the substrate for executing arbitrary code, runtimes, ecosystem tooling and a great developer experience. You will bring your passion for cultivating engineering best practices to support a distributed team of talented people building developer tooling in different language ecosystems and enable these technical experts to do the best work of their lives.

What You'll Do

You will be responsible for people management, setting technical direction, and partnering with product and executive leadership to drive major technical and product initiatives in harmony with Fastly’s strategic vision. You will have significant strategic impact and influence the direction of the company, as well as direct responsibility for new products within the Compute Platform.

People Management

• Lead teams responsible for the infrastructure, programmatic experience & tooling - Provide guidance and management of people managers and individual contributors, ensuring each member of the team has what they need to be successful. Indirect team is ~24 currently.
• Cultivate a positive and productive engineering culture - attracting and retaining exceptional engineering talent and nourishing their professional growth within the team.
• Support teams during times of rapid growth and organizational maturation by utilizing change management techniques and ensuring technical and operational alignment among teams and team members.
• Set the right balance between urgency and quality by implementing clear repeatable engineering processes & best practices.

Technical Direction

• Craft and execute the Compute Platform engineering strategy, ensuring it aligns seamlessly with the company's broader business goals and long-term vision.
• Forge strong ties with Product to foster a respectful and egalitarian “business first” approach to the roadmap.
• Outline functional requirements from key partners internally and externally, prioritize platform health, easy to use features, and establish critical development milestones. Contextualize and help prioritize work for the team while creating outlets for team innovation and engineering influence.
• Align the Compute Platform’s quarterly planning, staffing, and project schedules with constituents across the organization to minimize conflict and ensure consistent, timely, and high quality delivery.
• Champion scalability, resilience, and performance optimization and maintaining a strong connection with how efficiently we execute workloads on our infrastructure.
• Be a voice and an advocate for an excellent developer experience - for both our internal and external customers & users.

Partnership

• Develop a strong, egoless partnership with senior engineering leaders, product leaders, the Office of the CTO, and external organizations such as the Bytecode Alliance.
• Clearly and frequently communicate upward and outward to set expectations for roadmaps and deliverables to ensure broad technical alignment between engineering and other stakeholders across the business.
• Know how and when to shift resources across areas to achieve execution goals and respond to lessons from production issues - Focus on business practicality and the 80/20 rule; very high bar for output quality, but recognize the business benefit of "having something now" vs "perfection sometime in the future".
• Navigate cross-team expectations and provide clear succinct communication to other senior leaders across the organization.
• Facilitate honest conversations about trade offs, within and among teams, while celebrating success and championing opportunities that the team’s work opens up for the business.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years experience managing distributed engineering teams that build and operate software at scale. Experience leading teams that build efficient platform software on bare metal is a big plus.
• Demonstrable success in growing and nurturing a strong engineering culture & implementing engineering best practices - with a humble, respectful and compassionate leadership style.
• ~10+ years previous hands-on engineering experience building complex, large-scale, reliable, highly distributed systems with a focus on efficiency and performance optimization. While you won’t be defining architecture or writing code, you need to be able to understand technical nuance in design docs and other planning discussions to ensure technical consistency, scope and quality across the teams.
• Comfort working with the technologies we use (Rust, JavaScript, Go, WebAssembly, compiler technology, network protocols and caching concepts).
• Significant experience setting technical direction and building strategic roadmaps - demonstrating exceptional translation skills and partnership with product.
• Excellent collaboration and communication abilities with a variety of technical and non-technical stakeholders - must demonstrate expertise presenting, soliciting, feedback, and discussing complex technical concepts - including programming language ergonomics, runtimes, runtime performance, compilers etc.
• Demonstrate a flexible mindset, appreciating the benefit of constant iteration and improvement while keeping a pragmatic approach and empathy for users.

We’ll be super impressed if you have experience in any of these:

• WebAssembly or other container based technologies.
• Compilers.
• Network protocols and architectures.
• SRE or operational experience.
• Developer tooling & developer focused product lines.
• Open source.

Work Hours

This position will require you to be available during core North American business hours, and available to support the team through incidents that require escalation at any time.

Work Location(s) & Travel Requirements:

Fastly currently embraces a largely hybrid model for most roles which allows employees flexibility to split their time between the office and home.

This position is open to applicants in any Fastly US location, with preference on the following office locations:

• San Francisco
• Denver

We may consider highly qualified remote applicants in the US and Canada.

This position may require travel as required by your role or requested by your manager. Travel is required 1-2 times a quarter depending on need. Travel is typically to other office locations for events like tech summits, team summits, and planning activities.

Salary

The estimated salary range for this position if hired in the United States is $228,280 to $285,350. Starting salary may vary based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as experience, skills, qualifications, and location. This role may be eligible to participate in Fastly’s equity and discretionary bonus programs.

Benefits

We care about you. Fastly works hard to create a positive environment for our employees, and we think your life outside of work is important too. We support our teams with great benefits that start on the first day of your employment with Fastly. Curious about our offerings?

We offer a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, and vision insurance. Family planning, mental health support along with Employee Assistance Program, Insurance (Life, Disability, and Accident), a non-accrual vacation policy and up to 18 days of accrued paid sick leave are there to help support our employees. We also offer 401(k) (including company match) and an Employee Stock Purchase Program. For 2024, we offer 10 paid local holidays, 11 paid company wellness days.

Why Fastly?

• We have a huge impact. Fastly is a small company with a big reach. Not only do our customers have a tremendous user base, but we also support a growing number of open source projects and initiatives. Outside of code, employees are encouraged to share causes close to their heart with others so we can help lend a supportive hand.
• We love distributed teams. Fastly’s home-base is in San Francisco, but we have multiple offices and employees sprinkled around the globe. As a new hire, you will be able to attend our IN-PERSON new hire orientation in our San Francisco office! It is an exciting week-long experience that we offer to new employees to build connections with colleagues across Fastly, participate in hands-on learning opportunities, and immerse yourself in our culture firsthand.
• We value diversity. Growing and maintaining our inclusive and diverse team matters to us. We are committed to being a company where our employees feel comfortable bringing their authentic selves to work and have the ability to be successful -- every day.
• We are passionate. Fastly is chock full of passionate people and we’re not ‘one size fits all’. Fastly employs authors, pilots, skiers, parents (of humans and animals), makeup geeks, coffee connoisseurs, and more. We love employees for who they are and what they are passionate about.

We’re always looking for humble, sharp, and creative folks to join the Fastly team. If you think you might be a fit please apply!

A fully completed application and resume or CV are required when applying.

Fastly is committed to ensuring equal employment opportunity and to providing employees with a safe and welcoming work environment free of discrimination and harassment. Our employment decisions are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, family or parental status, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.

Consistent with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and federal or state disability laws, Fastly will provide reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please contact your Recruiter, or the Fastly Employee Relations team at or 501-287-4901.

Fastly collects and processes personal data submitted by job applicants in accordance with our Privacy Policy. Please see our privacy notice for job applicants.