Director of Engineering

About FactTrace FactTrace is an early-stage, deep-tech AI startup operating at the bleeding edge of content integrity and truth verification. We are building a next-generation AI platform designed to detect, verify, and analyze content authenticity in an era of rapidly scaling generative models. We are currently expanding our core engineering hub in Meknès and are looking for a highly experienced technical leader to drive our product delivery and operational scale. Role Overview We are seeking a Director of Engineering to lead our core platform engineering organization. In this executive role, you will bridge the gap between high-level strategic vision and rigorous technical execution. You will lead teams of teams, managing managers as well as mentoring and elevating elite individual contributors—including our Senior AI Platform & Distributed Systems Engineers. Because you will be leading top-tier talent, you need to be suitably technical; your technical depth must exceed the team's baseline. You must possess mastery over high-scale backend infrastructure and modern applied AI workflows, enabling you to set the architectural standards for deterministic multi-backend LLM orchestrations, robust event-driven microservices, and zero-downtime deployments.

Key Responsibilities
Department Leadership & Strategy: Lead the engineering organization by maintaining roadmaps and communicating effectively with the exec team to align technical execution with business objectives. People Management & Performance: Lead teams of teams and manage engineering managers. Handle task allocation, code reviews, and mentor junior and senior staff. Drive engineering culture through rigorous objective setting, performance assessments, and quarterly reviews. Delivery & Execution: Own product delivery timelines by effectively balancing tech debt vs. product delivery. Ensure high-velocity execution by optimizing speed of delivery and iteration. Architectural Authority: Act as the ultimate technical authority for designing low-latency, event-driven pipelines capable of ingesting millions of files reliably under strict SLA-driven production targets (99.99%+ uptime). AI Infrastructure Strategy: Oversee the deployment of production AI and agentic runtimes, including enterprise-wide LLM workflows, foundational Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations, and RAG knowledge bases. Organizational DevSecOps: Define the organizational standards for automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure (AWS, Linux, Docker), and integrated observability platforms (Grafana, Prometheus). Qualifications & Technical Mastery
• To effectively lead our engineering organization, the Director must possess advanced architectural mastery across our core tech stack:
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Experience:
10+ years of progressive software engineering experience, with at least 4+ years in a Director or Head of Engineering role managing senior-level ICs, managers, and complex product delivery.
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Education:
State Engineering Degree (Diplôme d'Ingénieur d'État) in Computer Science or Software Engineering from EMI, or an equivalent elite state engineering school.
• Backend & Systems Architecture: Mastery of Node.js / TypeScript and Python. You must have expert-level experience designing high-scale REST APIs, WebSockets, and event-driven microservices architectures.
• Applied AI & LLMs: Deep architectural expertise in LLM orchestration (Claude, OpenAI, local models), agentic runtimes, and strict safety guardrails. While MCP and advanced RAG (reranking, semantic routing) are nice-to-haves for our senior engineers, they are core requirements for this Director role.
• Databases & Distributed Storage: Enterprise-level competence in schema design, optimization, and scaling for PostgreSQL, alongside vector database architectures.
• Infrastructure & Observability: Proven track record of owning root-cause analysis, incident management, and cloud scaling strategies using Docker, Git, CI/CD, Grafana, and Prometheus.
• Languages & Working Model: Fluent English proficiency is required, along with a commitment to working full-time on-site at our Meknès tech hub.

What We Offer
• A critical leadership position shaping the future of a highly ambitious AI startup.
• Competitive executive compensation package.
• The opportunity to work on solving some of the most important engineering and alignment problems of our lifetime.
• A dynamic, highly skilled founding team environment.