Director of Engineering, AI

Description:

About Port

At Port.io, we are building an open and flexible Agentic SDLC Platform for modern engineering organizations. Following our recent $100M Series C funding round, we are in a phase of rapid hypergrowth with strong enterprise momentum.

We act as the central nervous system for engineering, enabling platform teams to unify their stack and expose it as a governed layer through golden paths for developers and AI agents. By combining rich engineering context, workflows, and actions, we help organizations transition from manual processes to autonomous, AI-assisted engineering workflows — while maintaining control and accountability.

As a product-led company, we believe in building world-class platforms that fundamentally shape how modern engineering organizations operate.

About the Role

We are seeking a strategic technical leader to drive the next phase of our engineering evolution. Reporting directly to the VP of R&D, you will carry two core mandates:

• Manage one or more engineering teams with a focus on AI development.
• Lead AI SDLC transformation efforts across the entire R&D organization.

This is a rare, high-leverage role at the intersection of people leadership, technical craft, and organizational transformation. If you want to define how an entire engineering organization works in the age of AI — and leave a lasting fingerprint on a fast-scaling SaaS platform — this role is for you.

What You'll Do:

Domain Ownership & People Management

• Assume operational leadership for critical R&D domains, including management of engineering teams focusing on AI.
• Manage, coach, and grow Team Leads and senior engineers, building leadership depth across your domains.
• Own team health, delivery velocity, and engineering quality for every team under your purview.

AI Developer Experience (AI DX)

• Lead the transformation of our engineering processes by implementing AI-driven tools, frameworks, and workflows.
• Significantly accelerate R&D throughput, optimize developer workflows, and foster an AI-first engineering culture — leading by example.
• Drive adoption of agentic coding tools (e.g., Cursor, AI agents) across teams and measure their impact on productivity.

Technical Authority & Governance

• Challenge existing architectural paradigms and introduce innovative, out-of-the-box solutions to complex technical problems.
• Mentor engineering teams and raise the bar for AI engineering quality and best practices across R&D.

Strategic Cross-Team Leadership

• Orchestrate complex, cross-functional initiatives that require deep technical alignment across disparate teams.
• Manage project delivery, timelines, and execution to ensure seamless cross-functional results.

Architectural Vision

• Define and execute the long-term technical AI roadmap, ensuring high standards of scalability, reliability, observability and engineering excellence across the platform.

• Engineering leadership experience: Extensive background as a Director of Engineering or equivalent senior technical leadership capacity (typically 8+ years of experience), overseeing multiple Team Leads and cultivating leadership talent in medium-to-large startup environments. Proven experience working in organizations with enterprise customers.
• Delivery track record: Demonstrated success managing cross-functional engineering teams and delivering large-scale technical projects.
• Deep GenAI expertise: Strong knowledge of LLMs, evals, RAG, AI harness/agent architectures, and production-grade AI systems.
• AI DX hands-on experience: Proven track record of implementing AI agents and tooling to improve R&D productivity across multiple teams, with measurable outcomes and adoption.
• Architectural vision: Strong track record of architectural decision-making, technical mentoring, and long-term roadmap planning.
• Communication: Exceptional ability to bridge the gap between technical teams and business stakeholders. Fluent Hebrew and English.
• Startup DNA: Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, hyper-growth environment where priorities shift and speed matters.

Why Port?

• Work on real problems at scale — Port serves enterprise engineering organizations with thousands of developers.
• Rare scope — own both team leadership and org-wide AI transformation from day one.
• Hyper-growth moment — $100M Series C, strong enterprise pipeline, and a category we're actively defining.
• Brilliant team — collaborate with world-class engineers and product leaders who care deeply about craft.