Director of Product Engineering

Director of Product Engineering

Why this role exists

Nomad is building the financial and property management infrastructure for the largest, least-served class of entrepreneurs in America: small landlords.

We already have:

• A strong, highly autonomous team of engineers

• A product customers rely on and value

• Real traction and meaningful revenue

This role exists to add leverage to a system that’s already working - helping us move faster, make better decisions, and scale intelligently.

The shape of the role

This is a coach role managing engineers but at the seam of engineering and product. You’re here to:

• Understand what’s working

• Improve how we decide what to build, and how we build

• Help a strong team operate high levels of clarity, speed, and impact

• Note this role is leading Engineering (with a focus on product Engineering) but is not leading Product

What you’ll own

You are accountable for outcomes over activity.

1. Product + engineering alignment

• Help define what’s worth building and why, and how we build product

• Bring rigor to opportunities: size, impact, tradeoffs, constraints

• Push for clarity before execution

• In engineering rooms, you may not be the deepest technical voice. In product rooms, you usually will and you find that asymmetry productive, not awkward.

2. Planning and execution quality

• Lead strong shaping and planning for cycles

• Identify risks early and force hard tradeoffs upfront

• Improve consistency of shipping without adding drag

3. Team leadership and development

• Support a highly autonomous team without micromanaging

• Build trust, context, and alignment

• Help engineers grow in ownership and capability

4. Cross-functional leadership

• Translate complexity into clear decisions

• Ensure engineers understand the “why” behind priorities

• Collaborate deeply with product, growth, and operations

5. Technical engagement (without becoming the bottleneck)

• Engage meaningfully in architecture, scoping, and risk

• Ask good questions and surface tradeoffs

• Trust the team’s context rather than prescribing solutions

6. AI evolution

• Lead us to continually deepen our adoption of AI (paired with human judgement and taste) in how we build

• Identify where AI meaningfully improves the product

• Increase leverage of a small team

What we’re looking for

You likely:

• Have been a strong engineer and moved into leadership, and maybe even product

• Have led high-performing engineering teams at a startup or growth-stage company

• Are product-minded and think in terms of business outcomes

• Bringing rigor and shape to product ideas before they reach engineering, instead of letting them arrive as creative starting points engineers must reshape mid-build.

• Know how to balance autonomy with alignment

And:

• You are low ego and collaborative

• You are trusted by engineers and trust them in return

• You can engage technically without needing to control every decision

• You care about developer productivity, happiness, and efficiency

• You have a point of view on how teams evolve from 5 → 10 → 20 engineers

• You are AI-pilled but wise enough to leverage the right tool for the job

What success looks like (first 6-12 months)

• Great, clear engineering decisions (how we build and why) including scoping major builds

• More consistent execution and fewer surprises during cycles

• Strong trust across engineering, product, and leadership

• Engineers feel supported, challenged, and growing

• AI meaningfully increases team leverage

This will not be a fit if:

• You don’t have years of leadership experience

• You want to redesign the org before understanding it

• You rely on heavy process to create alignment

• You don’t enjoy concretely defining major new features given the system’s constraints

• You need to be the smartest person in the room on every technical decision

• You prefer large teams, clear layers, and well-defined roles

• You haven’t worked in a small, fast-moving environment

• You’re not genuinely interested in using AI to evolve how teams operate

Why Nomad

• A strong, ownership-driven team

• A product customers already value

• A large, complex problem space with real financial impact

• Significant room to build - we’re early

Final note

If your instinct is to earn trust, bring clarity, and help a strong team operate at a much higher level, we should talk.

Location: Denver HQ (strongly preferred)

Compensation: Compensation: $180,000 to $240,000 base salary, plus equity. For an exceptional candidate with the right startup scaling experience, we may stretch beyond this range.