About AppSignal
AppSignal helps thousands of development teams monitor errors, performance, and logs across their applications. We serve teams in 60+ countries, compete head-to-head with Datadog, New Relic, and Sentry, and win on simplicity and developer experience.
We're a remote-first, Amsterdam-founded, and dual-HQ’ed company (Amsterdam and Austin), and we are growing. Our team of 30+ spans seven countries. We're building fast, shipping constantly, and operating with an async-first culture – though we love getting together in person whenever we can.
This is not an enterprise. We move quickly, hold a high technical bar, and care deeply about the product we build and the team that builds it.
The Opportunity
This role is critical as our engineering organization enters its next phase. You'll step into a team of approximately nine engineers covering the full tech stack and take ownership of how that team delivers.
You'll report directly to our CTO and work closely with our CPO and Chief Architect on the technical roadmap. This is a leadership-first role: 80%+ of your time is people, process, and direction. You'll stay close enough to the codebase to make good calls, but your primary job is building and leading the team, not writing production code day-to-day.
This role is the right one for someone who has done it before, wants real ownership at a growing company, and gets energized by the intersection of engineering craft and team building.
Location
We're looking for European-based candidates, with preference for Amsterdam, London, Czechia (Prague or Brno), or Poland). You must be within 2 hours of Central European Time (CET) to work effectively with the team.
We don't require you to be in the office. Nearly the entire company is distributed and async-first. That said, Amsterdam is where our core engineering team is concentrated, and we value the ability to meet in person occasionally.
What You'll Own
Engineering Team Leadership
- Own hiring, onboarding, performance, and development for a team of engineers spanning the full stack
- Be the manager your engineers grow with: direct feedback, clear expectations, career pathing
- Build toward a team of 15-20 over the next two years as we scale
Technical Direction
- Partner with CTO, Chief Architect, and Principal Engineer on architecture decisions, technical debt prioritization, and system design
- Own the engineering side of the roadmap: scoping, sequencing, and delivery across our current and future roadmap
- Maintain a high technical bar across code review, incident response, and release practices
AI-driven Development Culture
- Lead by example with AI-assisted development tooling (Copilot, Cursor, Claude, etc.) and set expectations for the team
- Own the integration of AI capabilities into AppSignal's product, including intelligent alerting, anomaly detection, and AgentSignal
- Build team norms and workflows that treat AI as a force multiplier, not an afterthought
Engineering Processes and Delivery
- Establish and continuously improve how we plan, build, ship, and learn
- Manage the delivery of projects across the platform and across the stack
- Lead by example with a blend of human and AI-assisted development tooling (Copilot, Cursor, Claude, etc.) and set expectations for the team
- Balance velocity and quality in a fast-moving startup environment
- Work cross-functionally with Product, CX, and GTM to align engineering capacity with company priorities
What You Bring
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years in software engineering with 3+ years in an engineering management role. You've been a manager, not just a tech lead with reports.
- Experience at a startup or scaling company under $25M ARR. You know what it means to operate with limited resources and high ambition.
- Full-stack instincts: you can review Ruby backend code, a Rust performance fix, and a React component PR in the same afternoon and give useful feedback on all three.
- Genuine AI development fluency. You use AI tools daily in your own work, you've shipped AI-powered product features, and you know how to build a culture where your team does the same.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems. You know how to reason about reliability, performance, and scalability at our scale.
- Remote-first experience. Async communication is natural for you; you don't need a shared office to stay aligned, but you also see the value in meeting your team IRL.
Preferred Qualifications
- Hands-on experience across a variety of languages (Ruby, Rust, Elixir are strong pluses)
- Background in observability, APM, developer tooling, or monitoring products
- API design and implementation experience
- Experience scaling an engineering team from 10 to 20+ people
- Familiarity with OpenTelemetry standards
Our Tech Stack
You don't need to be an expert in all of this, but you should be comfortable reasoning about it and reviewing work across the stack.
- Backend: Ruby (Rails), Elixir, Rust, Go
- Frontend: React, TypeScript, GraphQL
- Data: Clickhouse, MongoDB, time-series data, BigQuery (GTM analytics)
- Scale: 30B+ requests and terabytes of logs per month (and growing), monitoring agents in thousands of production environments
- Tools: GitHub, Slack, Basecamp, Figma
What We Offer
- Competitive salary adjusted to your location and experience
- Employee stock option program
- Unlimited PTO with a culture that actually uses it
- Personal development budget for books, courses, equipment or conferences
- Remote-first: no commute, no mandatory office. Co-working support available if useful.
- Flexible contract setup based on your location: employment, EOR, or long-term contractor
Who We Are
We're a team of 30+ curious, low-ego people spread across seven countries. We care about the work we do and the customers we serve. We move fast, hold each other accountable, and treat the engineering craft seriously.
We welcome candidates of all backgrounds, genders, orientations, ethnicities, ages, and abilities. If you want to do your best work somewhere that notices it, you'll feel at home here.
How to Apply
Apply online through Homerun by answering a few questions and uploading your resume. There's no need for a cover letter; we'd rather hear your thoughts directly in the application form.
Application form: https://appsignal.homerun.co/director-of-engineering/en
