Senior Director, Consumer Engineering

📋 Description

• • Babylist is seeking a visionary and experienced Senior Director of Consumer Engineering to lead the teams responsible for our core consumer-facing products: the registry, e-commerce shop, and all consumer experiences. This is a pivotal role for a leader who can accelerate growth at a company with significant momentum, resources, and a clear mission to support growing families. You will be instrumental in shaping the future of Babylist, driving innovation, and ensuring our technology empowers millions of families during one of life's most important transitions.
• • As the Senior Director of Consumer Engineering, you will oversee four front-line engineering managers and a team of over 30 engineers across web, iOS, and Android platforms. Your leadership will be crucial in building and maintaining the technical foundation that transforms potential confusion and anxiety for new parents into confidence and joy. Imagine a sleep-deprived parent at 2 AM searching for the perfect bottle, a gift-giver discovering a unique item through our registry, a first-time mom finding an article that answers her pressing questions, or a family effortlessly navigating our curated product selection – these are the moments your team's work directly impacts.
• • You will operate as a key partner in a product triad, working alongside the VP of Consumer Product and the Senior Director of Design. As equal partners, you will collaboratively shape Babylist's strategic direction. Engineering will not merely execute a pre-defined vision; you will be a central figure in defining it. Reporting directly to the CTO, you will expertly balance the ambitious vision for Babylist's future with the pragmatic execution required to achieve it, ensuring we are not only building the right products but also building them with exceptional quality and efficiency.
• • This role transcends simply scaling infrastructure or shipping features; it is about empowering families through a deeply supportive and intuitive platform during a profoundly transformative life experience. You will be at the forefront of evolving our existing successful products and exploring new avenues to serve parents through expanded business lines and deeper engagement.
• • Your responsibilities will encompass strategic product partnership, where you will act as a critical thought partner to Product and Design leaders. You will leverage your deep understanding of our users and market dynamics to co-shape roadmaps and annual plans, striking a balance between growing our core business and exploring new opportunities. You will bring strong product intuition and user empathy to identify high-leverage initiatives, ensuring engineering resources are strategically aligned with both business priorities and the delivery of exceptional customer experiences. A key aspect of this role is developing a profound understanding of the challenges parents face and translating these insights into actionable technical and product strategies that drive significant positive impact.
• • In engineering leadership and team building, you will lead, mentor, and grow a team of engineering managers and senior individual contributors. A significant part of your mandate will be expanding the organization by approximately 30% in 2026, all while maintaining an exceptionally high bar for talent and culture. You will be responsible for recruiting outstanding engineering leaders and senior individual contributors who embody Babylist's core values of ownership, excellence, and continuous learning, thereby building the team capable of propelling Babylist to its next stage of growth. Furthermore, you will cultivate an environment where engineers feel empowered to do their best work, fostering collaboration, psychological safety, and a culture of thoughtful risk-taking as the organization scales.
• • Operational excellence and scale are paramount. You will evolve our product development processes, building upon our established "you build it, you run it" philosophy and Shape Up principles. The goal is to create scalable, repeatable systems that enable sustained high performance as we transition from being very good to great. You will establish the necessary operational rigor, key metrics, and visibility to support ambitious growth targets while preserving our ability to move quickly and remain closely connected to our users. A critical component of this is owning long-term engineering capacity planning and technical roadmapping, proactively anticipating future staffing, skillset, and architectural needs 12-18 months in advance, ensuring that engineering never becomes a bottleneck to business success.
• • You will lead the integration of AI and ML capabilities into our user-facing products, which is slated to be a significant focus of our 2026 roadmap. This involves ensuring these technologies deliver tangible value to parents while simultaneously building the organizational expertise to leverage AI responsibly and effectively. You will champion the strategic adoption of AI-powered development tools and workflows across engineering teams, translating AI productivity gains into competitive advantages through faster iteration cycles, higher code quality, and increased engineering leverage. This requires balancing the transformative potential of AI for serving families with the responsibility to implement it thoughtfully, transparently, and in direct service of genuine user needs.
• • Finally, you will shape the technical vision and architecture. Partnering with engineering leaders, you will influence key technical architecture decisions that support both current operational scale and future growth across new business lines and product expansions. You will maintain a keen awareness of emerging consumer product and technology trends, translating these insights into strategic opportunities that keep Babylist at the forefront of innovation and strengthen our competitive position as the market leader. Ensuring our technical foundation—including observability, monitoring, incident response, and infrastructure—keeps pace with our rapid growth is essential, guaranteeing that families can depend on Babylist during life's most important moments.