Director of Engineering - Platform & Integrations

About ZenBusiness

ZenBusiness is dedicated to simplifying the process of launching and running businesses. Our mission is to empower entrepreneurs by removing the complexities of forms, taxes, and ongoing state compliance, allowing them to focus on growth. We are a remote-first company with a supportive and caring team.

The Role

We are seeking a Director of Engineering to lead our Enterprise Platform and Integrations team. This role is responsible for the people, platforms, and delivery practices that power our external partner integrations and connect partner experiences to ZenBusiness’s core capabilities. You will combine engineering leadership with strong integration responsibilities, establishing technical strategy, evolving our platform into a set of domain-aligned capabilities exposed through stable APIs, and working closely with Product, Business Systems, Operations, and external partners.

Responsibilities

Engineering and People Leadership

• Lead, coach, and develop engineers focused on Platform APIs and partner integrations.
• Establish clear ownership, expectations, and development opportunities.
• Implement effective engineering practices for planning, design reviews, code reviews, testing, deployment, documentation, and production support.
• Collaborate with Product and business leaders to build realistic roadmaps and make informed trade-offs.
• Support hiring, onboarding, performance management, and succession planning.
• Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.

API and Platform Strategy

• Define the technical vision and roadmap for ZenBusiness’s Enterprise APIs and integration capabilities.
• Lead the design and evolution of APIs, schemas, webhooks, authentication, fulfillment packages, and developer tools.
• Ensure APIs are scalable, secure, observable, well-documented, and easy for partners to adopt.
• Establish standards for API versioning, backward compatibility, change management, deprecation, and release communication.
• Reduce partner-specific customizations by developing reusable platform capabilities and consistent integration patterns.
• Partner with internal platform teams to connect Enterprise APIs to core business workflows.
• Lead through influence across engineering teams to establish clear ownership and resolve cross-team dependencies.
• Evolve core business capabilities for discovery and invocation by AI agents, ensuring authorization, observability, guardrails, and human oversight.

Partner Integrations

• Represent ZenBusiness in senior-level technical conversations with strategic partners.
• Guide partners through solution design, testing, and launch, establishing clear launch-readiness criteria.
• Translate partner needs into platform capabilities while protecting architectural integrity.
• Identify and mitigate integration risks, creating clear escalation plans.
• Coordinate across multiple departments (Product, Engineering, Sales, Partner Success, Operations, Legal, Security, Finance) for new partner capabilities.
• Ensure partner commitments, dependencies, ownership, and launch criteria are clearly documented.

Delivery and Operational Excellence

• Own the reliable delivery of API and integration roadmap commitments.
• Improve release processes for schemas, fulfillment packages, portal updates, changelogs, and production deployments.
• Establish service-level objectives and operational metrics for API availability, latency, errors, webhook delivery, data accuracy, and partner adoption.
• Strengthen monitoring, alerting, incident response, and root-cause analysis for partner-facing services.
• Ensure production incidents and partner escalations receive clear ownership and communication.
• Utilize operational data and partner feedback to identify platform improvements and prioritize investments.

How You’ll Work

You will work closely with:

• Product leaders for Enterprise, Formation, Compliance, Pricing, and Fulfillment
• Business Systems and Operations leadership
• Enterprise and API engineers
• Architecture, Security, Infrastructure, AI Platform, and Data teams
• Sales, Partner Success, and Implementation teams
• Strategic external partners and their technical teams

What Success Looks Like

Within the first 6–12 months, this leader will:

• Establish clear ownership, operating practices, and career development plans for the API pod.
• Build a prioritized technical roadmap balancing partner delivery, reliability, scalability, and technical debt.
• Improve the predictability and quality of API, schema, and integration releases.
• Establish measurable standards for API reliability, webhook delivery, integration health, and incident response.
• Improve partner onboarding through stronger documentation, reusable patterns, testing tools, and launch processes.
• Reduce integration defects, production incidents, and partner-specific engineering work.
• Develop trusted relationships with strategic partners and internal stakeholders.
• Create a scalable integration model supporting future product development.

Qualifications

• Significant experience leading software engineering teams, including managing engineering managers and/or senior engineers.
• Experience designing, building, or operating external APIs and enterprise integration platforms.
• Strong understanding of REST APIs, webhooks, event-driven architecture, authentication, API gateways, versioning, and integration security.
• Experience delivering complex integrations involving multiple internal systems and external partners.
• Demonstrated ability to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Strong understanding of software delivery, testing, observability, incident management, and production operations.
• Experience managing technical roadmaps, dependencies, risks, and cross-functional delivery.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate technical decisions to nontechnical audiences.
• Experience participating in customer- or partner-facing technical conversations.
• Ability to balance urgent partner needs with long-term platform health.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building developer portals, integration sandboxes, API documentation, SDKs, or partner certification programs.
• Experience supporting high-volume, business-critical integrations.
• Familiarity with schema-driven platforms, API lifecycle management, and automated contract testing.
• Experience leading teams through platform modernization or the migration of legacy integrations.
• Experience working in a product-led, SaaS, or platform organization.
• Experience leading complex, partner-facing enterprise integrations, including direct communication with senior product and engineering leaders at external companies.
• Strong prioritization and stakeholder-management skills.
• Ability to move between executive-level conversations and detailed technical or delivery decisions.

Leadership Profile

We are looking for a leader who:

• Develops people and creates clarity without becoming a delivery bottleneck.
• Is technically credible but does not need to be the person writing every solution.
• Can move comfortably between architecture, execution, operations, and partner conversations.
• Makes pragmatic decisions while protecting long-term platform scalability.
• Communicates risks and tradeoffs early and clearly.
• Builds strong relationships across technical, product, operational, and commercial teams.
• Treats documentation, reliability, and knowledge sharing as essential parts of engineering.

Remote Culture

ZenBusiness fosters a great company culture that leads to happy employees and customers. We provide competitive salaries, benefits, equity, and interesting challenges with a positive impact. We maintain connection through weekly "All Hands" meetings and a social committee that hosts frequent virtual events.

Benefits

The company offers comprehensive benefits including medical, vision, dental, disability, and life insurance, parental and military leave, an employee assistance program, 401k with match, annual bonus, pet insurance, and RSUs. (Note: Paid parking and 10 paid holidays are applicable to in-office employees).

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

At ZenBusiness, every voice counts. We celebrate the diversity of our teams, knowing that our products, services, and customers thrive best when we lean into and celebrate our differences.