Marcus Chen Director of Engineering
San Francisco, CA • marcus.chen@gmail.com • +1 415-555-0142
Profile Summary
- Director of Engineering with 15 years of experience leading engineering departments on developer platforms and messaging APIs across programmable messaging, sender identity, and deliverability, grown through Senior Engineer, Tech Lead, and EM roles before stepping into the manager-of-managers track.
- Solid engineering background across languages (Go, Python), services (gRPC, Kafka), cloud (AWS), and data (PostgreSQL) so I can hold the architecture conversation with my Staff Engineers without dictating it.
- Deep practice in multi-team strategy and vision, manager development and coaching, org design and team topology, and delivery and operational excellence, running weekly manager 1:1s and monthly skip-levels as the foundation of how the department operates.
- Partner closely with VP Engineering, peer Directors in Product, Design, and Data, plus Finance and the CTO office in public-stage developer platform companies, representing engineering in exec forums, headcount planning, budget reviews, and customer escalations, and treating the Director job as a force-multiplier on the managers and teams below me.
- Leader who protects a culture of engineering excellence and operational maturity through clear expectations, written postmortems, and direct feedback to managers, while running a Director peer cohort and contributing to the org's leveling, calibration, and promotion playbooks.
Technical Skills
- Leadership & Management:
- Manager development, skip-level 1:1s, performance calibration, leveling, succession planning, coaching EMs, addressing manager underperformance
- Org Design & Hiring:
- Team topology, ownership boundaries, headcount planning, hiring funnel design, comp calibration, role scoping, workforce planning
- Delivery & Operational Excellence:
- Quarterly planning, OKRs, DORA metrics, SPACE framework, on-call health, incident response, dependency tracking, scope negotiation
- Languages:
- Go, Python, TypeScript, Java, SQL
- Frameworks & Services:
- gRPC, Kafka, REST, GraphQL, microservices, event-driven systems, API gateways
- Cloud & Platform:
- AWS (EKS, Lambda, SQS, RDS), Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Datadog, PagerDuty
- Data & Messaging:
- PostgreSQL, Redis, DynamoDB, Kafka, Snowflake, dbt
- Budget, Roadmap & Strategy:
- Annual budget ownership, cloud cost management, vendor negotiation, multi-quarter roadmap, capacity allocation, exec reporting, board-level updates
Education
Carnegie Mellon University
B.S. in Computer Science
Work Experience
Twilio
Director of Engineering
- Lead the Messaging Platform department of 45 engineers across 6 teams through 5 EMs and 2 Staff Engineers reporting in, reporting to the VP Engineering and running weekly manager 1:1s plus monthly skip-levels to keep a real read on the teams two layers down.
- Set a 3-year engineering direction in the department charter, anchored on global deliverability and API platform consolidation as the two strategic pillars, with every quarterly commitment from the teams traced back to the message delivery rate north star the exec team agreed on.
- Run department delivery against a DORA scorecard reviewed in a weekly ops review with the EMs, driving the change failure rate from 18% to 6% while keeping deploy frequency steady and cutting weekend pages across all 6 on-call rotations.
- Partner with Staff and Principal Engineers on the technical direction of the messaging API platform, backing a multi-region active-active bet in the architecture review board that the department then executed against, with platform reliability landing at 99.99% uptime across the year.
- Co-own the quarterly investment plan with the Director of Product on a quarterly cadence, holding a 50 / 30 / 20 feature, platform, and reliability split that the exec team backed, and landing a 38% cut in platform tech debt across the same period.
- Represent the department in the weekly business review and the quarterly business review, pairing with peer Directors in Product, Design, Data, and GTM on cross-org bets and shepherding engineering through customer escalations that closed 3 enterprise renewals at risk in the prior year.
- Own headcount planning and the hiring funnel for the department, closing 22 hires across 3 years at the senior and above band, running comp calibration and leveling with HR, and holding the funnel at a 14% onsite-to-offer pass-through with 92% 24-month retention.
HubSpot
Senior Engineering Manager
- Reshaped the Marketing Hub backend group of 18 engineers into 3 stream-aligned teams with clear ownership boundaries, anchoring the re-pod around domains decision in the Team Topologies playbook and using it as the foundation for the manager-of-managers muscle I leaned on later.
- Set the engineering culture for the group through a written engineering values doc that the rest of the org later adopted, made blameless postmortems the standard incident response, and landed top-quartile eNPS across the group in two consecutive engagement cycles.
- Owned the group's annual $4.5M budget with Finance partnership, renegotiated the AWS enterprise contract alongside the platform team, and landed $720k in annual cloud-cost savings through reserved capacity, savings plans, and a targeted right-sizing pass.
- Invested in career growth through weekly 1:1s and written growth plans, supporting 8 promotions across the group and handing off 3 senior engineers into their own first-line EM roles inside the org, which seeded the EM bench I went on to lead from a layer up.