Locus The Software Factory
Director of Engineering
Who We Are
We're Locus. We move the world's goods.
Our algorithms have optimized over 1 billion deliveries. We're the enterprise TMS trusted by IKEA, Unilever, UPS and some of the largest supply chains on the planet. Backed by Ingka Group (IKEA's parent), we're building a composable, multi-modal transportation management system that's redefining logistics technology.
We're not hiring to fill seats. We're hiring builders who build for other builders.
What You'll Do
You are the end-to-end engineering owner of your portfolio accountable for technology excellence, delivery reliability, and team effectiveness across multiple teams and managers. Here's what that looks like day to day:
Set and uphold the technical bar, architectural leadership, deep design reviews, and hands-on guidance on complex backend, platform, and optimization systems.
Own delivery outcomes, ensure high-quality, production-ready features ship on committed timelines with strong operational readiness.
Build and develop high-performing engineering teams, mentor engineering managers and senior ICs, drive capability uplift across architecture, coding, and execution.
Act as a cross-functional leader, partner with Product, SRE, QA, Data Science, and GTM to align priorities, manage trade-offs, and deliver business impact.
Drive engineering culture and fundamentals, ownership, craftsmanship, CI/CD quality, observability, reliability, and long-term system health.
Lead strategic engineering initiatives, platform modernization, AI/optimization scaling, performance improvements, and global infrastructure evolution.
Communicate technical decisions, risks, and trade-offs clearly to executives and business stakeholders.
Own operational efficiency, uptime, production incident management, RCA, developer efficiency, and infrastructure cost control.
What You Bring
Must-Haves
14+ years of experience building and scaling enterprise-grade software platforms, at least 56 years in senior engineering leadership roles.
Proven experience leading multiple engineering teams and managers comfortable with 2040 person engineering spans.
Hands-on experience with large-scale backend systems, distributed architectures, and cloud environments (AWS preferred).
Strong understanding of microservices, messaging systems (Kafka, Redis, RabbitMQ), and databases at scale.
Demonstrated ability to take products from concept to design to delivery to production operation.
Strong systems thinking, ability to design, evolve, and operate large-scale distributed platforms.
Sound judgment in balancing technical quality, delivery speed, reliability, and cost.
Effective people leadership, coaching, feedback, capability assessment, and succession planning.
Business-oriented mindset, understanding of how engineering decisions drive customer outcomes and company growth.
Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, especially for cross-functional and executive-level alignment.
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or related field.
Strong Signals - We Actively Look for These
Degrees don't tell us much. These do:
You've led engineering organizations through inflection points, a platform rewrite, a market expansion, a significant scale event and you can articulate what you learned.
You've built and grown engineering managers, not just individual contributors.
You've driven a measurable improvement in engineering culture, delivery predictability, operational excellence, or team capability.
You've built something on your own time, open source, side project, internal tool.
You've contributed to a top open-source project.
You've filed a patent or published research.
You've written technical content others reference, or spoken at a conference.
You've competed in or completed something grueling ultra-marathon, Ironman, competitive programming, hackathon wins.
We don't fill seats. We hire builders who build for other builders
What We Don't Care About
Which college you went to. Seriously.
Whether your resume has Big Tech logos.
How many years you've held exactly this job title.
We care about what you built, why you couldn't stop, and how you think.
The Stack
Languages: Java, Kotlin, Python, TypeScript, Spring / Spring Boot
Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch
Data / ML: Spark, Airflow, optimization engines (routing, ETA, slotting)
Scale: 350+ deployments
- 30+ countries
- billions of deliveries
- high-volume daily computations
Why Locus is different:
This isn't a perks list. It's a contract between Locus and people who build.
- Inference Compute Budget - For Builders Who Ship: Every engineer gets $5,000/year in AI/LLM inference credits, The budget is the baseline, you need more we have it for you!
- Patent Premium - Your Name on It. Permanently: File a patent at Locus, your name stays on it for Eternity, Check our Patents and patents holders
- Lifetime Royalty Program - Build the Builders: Build an internal tool that automates a process or makes us more efficient Locus pays you a royalty, not just while you're here, but even after you leave.
- Excellence Beyond Code Ironman, ultra-marathon, national-level sport, FIDE 2000+, we see these as signals of craft, grit, and finishing. They matter to us.
- Open Source Bounty Active contributor to a top-1000 GitHub repo Joining bonus. Active maintainers get dedicated 20% time to keep contributing.
- Conference Speaker Fund Accepted to speak at a global conference We cover travel, registration, and stay. No questions asked.
- 1 Billion Deliveries on Your Resume: You can truthfully say: My code optimized 1B+ deliveries across 30+ countries. We verify it.
- Alumni Network That Doesn't Forget You: Leaving Locus You still get a reduced compute budget ($1K/yr), alumni summit access, referral bonuses, and a fast-track to re-hire.
Apply
Send us:
Your GitHub / portfolio / anything you've built - required. More important than your resume.
A one-liner on why Locus interests you.
Email: [Confidential Information]
We don't hire the best people and tell them what to build. We hire builders and get out of their way. - Locus Engineering
