Director of Engineering - Hosting

About Pantheon

Pantheon brings together exceptional builders who take ownership, drive meaningful impact, and shape what's next for the web. We power more than 300,000 websites globally for organizations including Google, Princeton, Salesloft, Clorox, and the United Nations. Every day, thousands of developers and marketers use our WebOps platform to build, iterate, and scale WordPress, Drupal, and Next.js sites that reach billions of people worldwide. As an employer, we operate with the same philosophy that drives our product: foundation and freedom. Pantheon is a vibrant, remote-forward team of experts who care deeply about their craft and results. Here, you take ownership of work that matters, contribute alongside exceptional people, and see the impact you create.

The Role

Pantheon is seeking a Director of Engineering to lead the Hosting Platform - the team responsible for the infrastructure powering 700,000+ websites and 17 billion monthly page views. This is not a supporting role. You will own the technical direction of the systems at the core of Pantheon's business: edge delivery, container orchestration, database services, and site lifecycle management at scale.

We're looking for an engineering leader who has operated cloud infrastructure at scale — at a company that sells a cloud service, developer platform, or managed hosting product — and who understands what it means to support highly technical customers under real pressure. You know what on-call looks like at this scale. You've handled critical customer escalations. You have strong opinions about what good looks like, and you're not afraid to push for it.

What You Need to Succeed 

• Own the technical roadmap for Pantheon's hosting infrastructure, driving reliability, scalability, and performance across hundreds of thousands of customer sites and billions of monthly requests
• Lead and mentor Engineering Managers and senior engineers, building a high-performing team with a culture of ownership, operational rigor, and continuous improvement
• Drive architectural decisions for large-scale distributed systems, with particular focus on edge delivery, caching strategies, database operations, and multi-tenant infrastructure
• Define and enforce SLOs, observability standards, and incident response practices that keep the platform stable and customers confident
• Manage critical customer escalations directly — understanding the technical depth of what customers are running and communicating clearly under pressure
• Balance technical debt against platform stability, making principled trade-offs that keep the system healthy as it scales
• Represent Pantheon's technical interests with key technology partners and vendors
• Champion AI-native engineering practices across the team, integrating AI tooling into workflows, automation, and architectural decision-making

What You Bring to the Table

Experience

• 12+ years of engineering experience with 3+ years managing other managers
• Background at a company that sells a cloud service — you understand what it means to operate infrastructure that customers depend on and pay for
• Proven track record leading high-performing engineering teams through meaningful technical transformation
• Executive-level communication skills; able to translate complex infrastructure concepts for product, sales, and executive audiences
• Deep experience with on-call operations and customer escalation management at scale
• Advanced knowledge of GCP, AWS, or Azure and container orchestration systems (Kubernetes)

Technical Depth

• Expert-level understanding of distributed systems, cloud-native infrastructure, and large-scale multi-tenant hosting environments
• Hands-on experience with the database and caching technologies that power production web infrastructure: Nginx, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch
• Strong familiarity with web runtime environments: PHP, Node.js, and related application server technologies
• Experience with CDN and edge delivery architecture — caching strategies, cache invalidation, edge performance optimization
• Proficiency in Go, Python, or equivalent systems-oriented languages
• Supporting AI-native development workflows, including LLM integration and agentic automation
• Staff-level architectural knowledge with a track record of driving decisions through in-depth technical discussion

What We Offer

We have all the usual perks and benefits but what we can really offer you is a fantastic work environment powered by an amazing team.

• Industry competitive compensation and equity plan
• Flexible time off, sick days, and 13 paid holidays
• Comprehensive medical insurance including Health, Dental and Vision
• Paid parental leave (plus fertility, adoption and other family planning benefits)
• In-office workspace (San Francisco & Chicago)
• Monthly allowance for wellness, reading and access to LinkedIn Learning for continued development
• Events and activities both team-based and company wide that inspire, educate and cultivate

Pantheon is an equal opportunity employer and we welcome applications from all backgrounds regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability, or any other classification protected by law. Pantheon complies with federal and local disability laws and makes reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation due to a disability for any part of the interview process, please contact talent@pantheon.io. Pursuant to local and federal regulations, Pantheon will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment.

After an offer is made and accepted, E-verify will be utilized to establish your identity and employment eligibility as required by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

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The US base salary range for this position in the United States is $216,000 - $270,000 USD per year. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. At Pantheon, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case.

Visa Sponsorship is not available at this time.