Director, Software Engineering - WhatsApp

About

More than 3 billion people in over 180 countries use WhatsApp to stay in touch with friends and family, anytime and anywhere. In Brazil, it is also where a great deal of everyday life gets done — people message businesses, coordinate their families, and increasingly send money as easily as they send a message. We are building a new team to take WhatsApp further in that direction. The newly established WhatsApp Services team is focused on making WhatsApp more useful for more of what people already use it for, and on building what comes next. This engineering leader for Brazil will oversee the newly established WhatsApp Services team, treated as a zero-to-one effort so we can move fast, take risks, and build as we go. Staffed and prioritized, like every other WhatsApp team, from day one. Payments on WhatsApp aren’t a bet on paper: live and growing in Brazil; the existing WhatsApp payments engineering team moves across as the foundation. As an engineering leader at WhatsApp, you will use your start-up mindset and your full range of engineering leadership skills to produce elegantly simple products. You’ll be expected to push the boundaries of what’s possible in a mobile app, while sharing in our commitment to quality and attention to detail. This is a role for someone who can hold both the ceiling and the floor: sets an ambitious long-term technical vision for what WhatsApp can become in Brazil.

Responsibilities

• Build, manage and support varied teams of engineers and engineering managers delivering one of the highest-priority initiatives across WhatsApp and Meta.
• Define and execute engineering strategy and multi-team roadmaps that balance technical investment, emerging capabilities and business priorities.
• Establish a shared technical vision across the company (WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger) and ensure all teams are clear on the strategy, the problem to solve, the timeline and the contribution required of them.
• Build and scale the engineering organization by attracting, developing and retaining engineers and engineering managers across multiple teams.
• Establish team structures and operating models that maximize impact while minimizing organizational complexity and execution overhead.
• Partner with product, design and data science counterparts to drive shared accountability for outcomes across the full product development lifecycle.
• Proactively identify and resolve the largest cross-functional execution risks, including vision gaps, dependency conflicts and organizational blockers, escalating clearly when team priorities conflict.
• Cultivate a culture of executional excellence and analytical rigor, driving process improvements across teams and functions that reduce operational overhead and accelerate delivery.
• Champion engineering craft and quality standards across teams, fostering a self-reinforcing culture of continuous improvement.
• Monitor and act on organizational health signals to maintain high engagement, low attrition and effective team dynamics across reporting lines.
• Develop a leadership bench through both external hiring and internal growth, and contribute to company-wide engineering initiatives including recruiting, mentorship and technical standards.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of technical industry experience in software engineering
• 7+ years of engineering management experience, including managing other engineering managers
• Track record of building and scaling engineering organizations, including recruiting, developing and retaining engineers and engineering managers
• Proven track record of delivering and operating large-scale production systems
• Experience establishing technical strategy and organizational roadmaps across multiple teams, with demonstrated ability to drive execution against them
• Experience forming cross-functional partnerships across product, design and data science to deliver large-scale engineering outcomes
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience Experience building and operating payment systems at scale, including the reliability, correctness and regulatory requirements they carry
• Background in monetization, payments, commerce, or AI/ML products
• Experience building 0-to-1 organizations or standing up new product areas
• Experience with global, multi-market products (particularly emerging markets)
• Experience managing distributed teams across multiple sites
• Familiarity with messaging platforms or mobile-first consumer products