Director of Engineering

Hi, we're Nuts.com!

Nuts.com is a self-funded, profitable, rapidly growing multi-channel DTC specialty food and wellness company with over 550 people on our team. We're changing the landscape of snacking on nuts, dried fruit, chocolate and more! We planted our roots in Newark, New Jersey during the Great Depression, selling premium nuts on Mulberry Street's open-air market. We've come quite a long way since then, taking our multi-generational family business online in 1999. Even after 97 years, we continue to pride ourselves in expertly sourcing the highest quality foods and treating our customers like family.

What's our team like? We're driven, collaborative and entrepreneurial. Energy and passion power our business and we look for candidates who share in that excitement to help us continue to build something special.

The role:

As Director of Engineering, you will lead our engineering organization, owning how we build, what we build on, and the people who build it. Our engineering team solves high-impact ecommerce problems at scale — across our commerce platform (Shopify and NetSuite), the internal tools that power Operations, CX, Merchandising and B2B, and the data and AI capabilities that make all of it smarter. This role is a chance to shape that growth from the front — it is a highly technical, hands-on leadership role: you'll stay close to the code, drive architectural decisions, own documentation and systems planning, and build the systems that let others move faster.

You'll partner closely with our principal architect, who owns the design of our most complex and critical systems. Today, nearly every technical decision funnels through that one person — your job is to build the leadership, structure, and shared technical ownership around that deep talent so the team is no longer one-deep on what matters: setting direction, deciding what we work on and in what sequence, managing stakeholders across the company, and developing the engineers who deliver. You'll partner deeply with Product, Design, and Data to make sure we're solving the right problems at the right depth — balancing the near-term work that moves the business with the platform investments that compound over time. You'll own the health of the org as much as its output: hiring where needed, developing engineers and growing senior engineers into mentors and leads, and building a culture people are proud to be part of.

How you'll make an impact:

• Build and lead a high-performing engineering organization — hiring, developing, and supporting engineers, and creating an environment of high trust, ownership, and clarity.
• Drive improvements to developer velocity — reducing friction, improving tooling, and enabling teams to ship features faster and more safely.
• Own the architecture bar, direction, and tradeoffs across the team — accountable for whether our systems, from our Shopify and NetSuite commerce ecosystem to internal tooling and data/AI platforms, scale and serve the business.
• Experience leading engineering in a vendor-heavy, integration-dense commerce stack, including managing technical vendor relationships, escalations, and build vs. buy vs. configure decisions.
• Reduce key-person risk — drive documentation of critical systems, establish shared technical understanding, and build redundancy so no single system or decision depends on one person.
• Balance technical depth with strategic thinking, staying hands-on while also setting long-term direction.
• Decide what we work on and in what sequence. Own roadmaps and outcomes in deep partnership with Product, adapting priorities as we learn and translating company goals into clear, sequenced engineering work, protecting the org's focus so the most important problems get solved first.
• Own stakeholder management on behalf of engineering — building trust with leadership and partner functions, communicating tradeoffs and timelines, and making sure the business and the team stay aligned.
• Set and raise the bar for engineering craft and delivery — through architecture reviews, incident reviews, strong on-call and reliability practices, and a culture of continuous learning and mentorship.
• Own production quality on a high-traffic ecommerce site: release discipline, monitoring and alerting, regression prevention, and a clear framework for prioritizing customer-impacting bugs against roadmap work.
• Shape how we adopt AI in how we build and in what we ship, making thoughtful, durable bets rather than chasing novelty.
• Own the integrity of our analytics and experimentation infrastructure, ensuring event instrumentation, attribution, and testing tooling are reliable enough to run the business on.
• Evolve how the team works — improving how we hire, structure work, plan, and collaborate across functions as we scale
  
  

How we work:

One Team. We don't think in channels — we think in customers, and we don't think departments matter beyond the skills and context they bring. We'd rather align around the goals we're working to achieve and get the right people, with the right context, in the right room to solve problems holistically. Engineering is focused on customer and business outcomes, not just shipping.

Hypothesis-Driven Execution. We don't believe in "best practices" or "industry KPIs." We don't care about "benchmarks" — instead we work to be the best we can possibly be. We form a point of view, test quickly, and update our beliefs. We seek to work in sequence, not in parallel, constantly asking what the most important hypothesis is right now and how to confirm or reject it as fast as possible. We don't expect to be perfect the first time.

Brand & Performance Together. We care equally about velocity and trust — in our systems and with our customers. Speed that quietly accrues fragility or risk is a long-term loss. We build things that are both fast to ship and built to last.

Operate With Context. The systems and tools we build shape both the customer and the employee experience. We make decisions holistically, share context early and often, and are skeptical about everything and precious about nothing — ideas can and should come from anywhere.

We're excited about you because:

• You're a proven engineering leader. You have 10+ years of software engineering experience and 6+ years of engineering management experience. You are passionate about developer experience and have a track record of building tools and systems that make other engineers more productive.
• You build and grow engineers, not just ship work. You hire well, develop senior engineers, manage performance, and create environments where engineers do their best work and grow their careers.
• You set technical direction and hold the bar. You're a strong, credible technologist who has earned the trust of senior engineers, and you can hold the architecture bar across a complex commerce and operations stack — making pragmatic tradeoffs on scalability, reliability, cost, and risk. You raise the level of the engineers around you and set direction, providing strategic technical feedback.
• You're great at sequencing and focus. You can take a long list of competing demands and turn it into a clear order of operations, and you protect the team's focus on what matters most. You operate with urgency and intentionality, moving quickly and focusing the org on the right problems while continuously improving how we work.
• You're a strong stakeholder manager. You build trust across leadership and partner functions, communicate tradeoffs and timelines clearly, and keep the business and the team aligned.
• You're a customer- and business-centric leader. You collaborate naturally with Product, Design, Data, and other stakeholders, and you orient your org around impact rather than output.
• You thrive in a fast-paced and ambiguous environment. You're a naturally curious, proactive self-starter, constantly on the lookout for the highest-leverage problems and the simplest path through them. You can create structure and clarity for your team even in ambiguity.
• You're a skilled communicator. You absorb and distill complexity into simple terms that drive decisions, and you build clarity and alignment across functions and with senior leadership.
• You're thoughtful about AI. You're familiar with frontier models' capabilities and limitations and how to apply them effectively — both to how your teams build and to what they ship.

What you’ll bring:

• Bachelor's degree in Food Science, Culinary Science, or related field preferred
• Minimum 8 years of experience in food product development or R&D, preferably in shelf-stable snacks, chocolate/confections, CPG, or food manufacturing
• Strong track record developing commercially viable, scalable recipe formulations for shelf-stable snacks; experience with chocolate strongly preferred
• Working knowledge of food safety, quality, and regulatory considerations in formulation development
• Experience partnering with operations and commercialization teams to scale recipes from bench to production
• Agility and self-motivation, with the ability to juggle many projects at once in a fast-moving environment
• A highly collaborative working style and strong cross-functional communication skills
• Bonus: experience with financial modeling of cost impacts for new formulations
  
  

What we offer

• A high-growth and rewarding role in a foundationally strong and rapidly evolving business
• Annual Salary Range: $215,000 - $230,000 plus annual bonus
• Excellent benefits including a 401K Match
• Paid Maternity, Adoption and Paternity leave
• And all the Nuts.com snacks your heart desires + a 40% employee discount

EEO STATEMENT

Nuts.com is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard of actual or perceived race, color, creed, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, immigration status, age, sex or gender (including pregnancy), gender identity or expression (including transgender status), sexual orientation, marital status, veteran status, physical or mental disability, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local laws.

Applicants with disabilities who require assistance or accommodation during the application or interview process should reach out to us at people@nuts.com