The Opportunity
We’re looking for a Director of Engineering to lead infrastructure strategy, cost and capacity management, vendor relationships, operational risk, and technical planning across GIPHY.
This role will partner closely with GIPHY's engineering managers and technical leaders across SRE/Data, Content, and Search/AI. The Director will focus on the broader technical, financial, operational, and partner-facing responsibilities that keep GIPHY scalable, reliable, cost-effective, and positioned for future growth.
The ideal candidate combines strong technical depth with clear communication, strong judgment, and a collaborative leadership style.
The Day to Day
Own infrastructure and technical strategy across GIPHY, with a focus on scalability, reliability, maintainability, and cost.
Monitor infrastructure spend, utilization, capacity, and commitments; identify opportunities to optimize cost and performance.
Manage key vendor relationships, including AWS and other infrastructure, observability, search, AI, and IT providers.
Support contract negotiation, renewal decisions, spend requests, and vendor evaluations.
Partner with SRE and engineering leadership on reliability, incident response, operational readiness, and security risk.
Evaluate emerging technologies and vendors through targeted prototypes and technical due diligence.
Work with Product, BD, and external partners to understand scale, integration, and technical requirements.
Represent Engineering in strategic partner and vendor conversations.
Oversee GIPHY’s external IT support model and related vendor relationships.
Partner closely with engineering managers and technical leads while complementing, rather than duplicating, day-to-day project and people management.
Build alignment across teams, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and avoid unilateral decision-making.
Value Product and cross-functional partners as part of defining priorities, outcomes, and execution plans.
What Success Looks Like
Infrastructure spend and capacity are well understood and actively managed.
Major technical, operational, security, and cost risks are identified early.
Vendor relationships and contracts are proactively managed.
New technologies are evaluated thoughtfully before adoption.
Engineering teams have clear support and escalation paths without excessive dependency on any one person.
Product, Engineering, BD, and leadership are aligned on major technical decisions and tradeoffs.
What You’ll Bring to the Role
10+ years engineering experience
5+ years of leadership and people-management experience leading engineering teams
Engineering leadership experience in infrastructure, platform, distributed systems, search, AI, or large-scale consumer technology.
Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, reliability, observability, capacity planning, and cost optimization.
Experience managing strategic technology vendors and contracts.
Strong executive and cross-functional communication skills.
Ability to evaluate unfamiliar technologies and make pragmatic build/buy/adopt/defer decisions.
Collaborative, low-ego leadership style with strong judgment and accountability.
GIPHY
GIPHY sits at the intersection of personal communication and shared moments. GIPHY is the best way to search, share, discover and create GIFs on the Internet. The content on GIPHY's website, app, and API is all of the best and most popular GIFs on the web, along with content created by talented GIF artists and world-class brands. Our goal is to help make finding and sharing the good GIFs easier.
Shutterstock
Shutterstock connects diverse artists and creative professionals around the globe with the agencies, brands and people who need their work and services. It’s a place where creators come to be inspired and discover new ways to produce their best work. Shutterstock enables its employees to drive culture and tap into the world around them to develop the toolbox and solutions that help others share their world views. At…