Director of Engineering, AI

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.

Requirements: • 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.