Compensation Transparency

At Nomad, we are committed to offering competitive compensation that reflects the value each team member brings to our mission. Salary ranges for this role are determined based on factors such as experience, skills, location, and role expectations. Final offers may vary from the posted range, ensuring fair and equitable consideration for every candidate.

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.

1. 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.

2. 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

3. Team leadership and development

• Support a highly autonomous team without micromanaging

• Build trust, context, and alignment

• Help engineers grow in ownership and capability

4. Cross-functional leadership

• Translate complexity into clear decisions

• Ensure engineers understand the “why” behind priorities

• Collaborate deeply with product, growth, and operations

5. 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

6. 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