Director of Engineering Operations

About Ethos

Ethos is on a mission to bridge the human readiness gap by transforming how training is developed, consumed, and aligned with strategic business outcomes. As a well-funded Series A startup ($40M+ raised), we are a trusted partner to over 150 enterprise customers across sectors including the U.S. military, life sciences, manufacturing, supply chain, and professional sports. We are expanding our engineering team to evolve a best-in-class platform that makes learning smarter, faster, and more optimized. 

About the Role

You’ll play a critical role in optimizing the efficiency and effectiveness of our engineering organization. Reporting directly to the CTO, you will lead engineering operations, facilitate cross-functional collaboration, and ensure smooth execution of engineering initiatives in a high-growth startup environment. This is an opportunity to bring order and excellence to complex engineering processes, accelerate velocity and quality, and enable our engineers to do their best work. 

What You’ll Do

• Agile & Delivery Leadership: Run scrums, standups, retrospectives, and sprint planning in coordination with Product. Drive predictability, accountability, and throughput across teams.
• Program & Portfolio Management: Oversee planning and tracking of engineering initiatives, ensuring roadmap alignment, clear ownership, and on-time delivery.
• Process Optimization: Improve workflows, SDLC, and tooling to increase velocity, reduce cycle time, and raise quality.
• Release & Incident Operations: Own the release calendar, change management, and incident response (severity matrix, on-call, postmortems/PIRs).
• Metrics & Reporting: Define and track engineering KPIs (e.g., DORA, SPACE, defect escape rate, roadmap hit rate). Build and maintain operational dashboards.
• Cross-Functional Alignment: Act as the connective tissue between Engineering, Product, Security, Compliance, and customer-facing teams.
• Team Operations: Support recruiting, onboarding, team administration, and coordination across distributed teams.
• Risk & Compliance: Partner with Security to support SOC 2/ISO 27001 audit readiness, evidence collection, and SDLC controls.
• Vendor & Budget Management: Evaluate, implement, and manage engineering tools and SaaS spend

Measures of Success (First 6–12 Months)

• Improve sprint predictability (planned vs. delivered) to ≥85%.
• Reduce mean cycle time and PR review latency by 20–30%.
• Launch an Engineering Operations dashboard with DORA metrics and defect escape tracking.
• Implement and run an incident response playbook; achieve 100% PIR completion within 5 days.
• Cut CI pipeline time by 20% while improving reliability.
• Ensure roadmap delivery hit rate of ≥90% quarterly.

30/60/90 Day Plan

First 30 Days — Learn & Assess

• Onboard to Ethos’ culture, engineering org, and product roadmap.
• Shadow agile ceremonies and partner with Product leads.
• Audit workflows, tooling (Jira, CI/CD, incident processes), and collaboration patterns.
• Establish baselines (cycle time, PR latency, sprint predictability, MTTR).
• Build relationships with engineering leads, PMs, and stakeholders.

60 Days — Optimize & Implement

• Take ownership of daily engineering standups.
• Publish v1 of the Engineering Operations Dashboard (DORA + quality KPIs).
• Establish release gating criteria (Definition of Ready/Done).
• Stand up incident response playbook, severity matrix, and postmortem template.
• Drive the first process improvement (e.g., reduce CI times, improve planning accuracy).
• Partner with Security on audit/compliance evidence collection workflows.

90 Days — Drive & Scale

• Achieve ≥85% sprint predictability.
• Cut CI/CD duration by 20% while improving reliability.
• Ensure 100% postmortem completion within 5 business days of incidents.
• Roll out a quarterly Engineering Ops Review with KPIs, risks, and improvements.
• Partner with CTO/Product on capacity modeling and portfolio planning for the next quarter.
• Propose a roadmap of longer-term operational improvements (e.g., feature flags at scale, improved on-call rotations, documentation hygiene).

Basic Qualifications 

• 5+ years in Engineering Operations, TPM, or Program Management within a fast-paced environment.
• Proven success running agile ceremonies and improving engineering velocity/quality.
• Strong understanding of agile methodologies, SDLC, and project management principles.
• Exceptional organizational skills; able to manage multiple priorities.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Comfortable in a startup environment that demands high ownership and autonomy.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in software engineering or a technical field.
• Experience with Jira/Linear, GitHub, CI/CD platforms, Datadog/New Relic, LaunchDarkly/feature flags.
• Built and scaled operational dashboards (DORA/SPACE).
• Managed incident response and release operations.
• Supported SOC 2/ISO 27001 or similar compliance programs.
• Led distributed teams or managed TPMs/Program Managers.

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive base salary: $215k-$250k (based on location and experience) + significant equity upside.
• Subsidized health insurance, 401(k), life insurance, and cell phone stipend.
• Remote-first culture with up to 10% travel for offsites.
• Work eligibility: Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S.

One Final Note

We’re committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace. If you’re excited about this role but your experience doesn’t perfectly align with every qualification, please apply—you may be just the right candidate.

EEO & accommodations: Ethos is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and provide reasonable accommodations throughout the hiring process.