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.

• 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.
• 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
• Team leadership and development
• Support a highly autonomous team without micromanaging
• Build trust, context, and alignment
• Help engineers grow in ownership and capability
• Cross-functional leadership
• Translate complexity into clear decisions
• Ensure engineers understand the “why” behind priorities
• Collaborate deeply with product, growth, and operations
• 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
• 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.

Compensation Range: $180K - $240K