About the role

We are looking for an experienced, highly technical R&D Director to lead and evolve our core production platform – a mission-critical, AI-powered system at the heart of our customer delivery across multiple business lines.

In this role, you will take end-to-end ownership of a large-scale, enterprise-grade platform delivering real-time and offline transcription and captioning services to global customers. You will lead a high-performing engineering team, drive system reliability, scalability, and efficiency, and continuously enhance the platform through smart, incremental innovation.

This is a hands-on leadership role focused on operating and improving a complex cloud-based (AWS) system powered by advanced AI models, with a strong emphasis on engineering excellence, operational rigor, and customer impact.

In this role, you will:

• Lead and manage the core platform engineering teams, providing clear direction, prioritization, and hands-on guidance to ensure reliable and high-quality delivery.
• Own the stability, scalability, and performance of a mission-critical production system, serving as the backbone of the company’s customer delivery.
• Working with a complex system of services featuring event-driven asynchronous communication, multiple customer-facing APIs, and infrastructure as code. The codebase is primarily written in Python, Ruby, and React
• Drive continuous improvement of the platform, focusing on reliability, efficiency, and incremental feature development aligned with business needs.
• Drive backlog management and execution planning, ensuring clear prioritization, predictable delivery, and alignment with business goals.
• Collaborate closely with Product and cross-functional stakeholders to shape priorities, balance roadmap commitments, and ensure consistent execution.
• Establish strong engineering practices and operational rigor, including monitoring, incident management, and quality standards across the system.
• Leverage modern AI development tools to accelerate engineering velocity, enabling teams to deliver faster while maintaining high standards of quality and maintainability.
• Build strong working relationships with key stakeholders, serving as a trusted advisor and go-to partner for solving complex challenges and driving informed decisions.
• Define and track key metrics (e.g., system reliability, delivery cycle time, efficiency), and use them to drive continuous improvement.
• Lead hiring, onboarding, and development of top engineering talent, building a high-performing team with strong ownership and execution mindset.

In order to be great at this job, you’ll need:

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field
• At least 8 years of experience leading R&D teams and experienced in managing managers (team leads)
• Strong technical background and hands-on experience, expertise in AWS and Python/React
• Proven track record of leading the development of successful AI-powered products
• Experience in building SaaS, enterprise grade, distributed infrastructure systems
• Significant experience with DevOps, CI/CD, and software delivery processes
• Experience with LLM and generative AI applications – an advantage
• Excellent leadership, mentorship, and communication skills
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to navigate complex technical challenges
• Ability to manage a broad attention span, maintaining context and driving progress across multiple parallel projects simultaneously

What makes Verbit unique?

Our team of 250 professionals builds AI-driven solutions that help the world’s leading organizations get real value from their audio and video content. We serve high-end customers across the Legal, Media and Education markets with a next-generation verbal-intelligence platform that brings AI into the core of their workflows.

Our in-house technology combines advanced LLMs, GenAI capabilities and speech AI to power everything from legal-tech automation and real-time insights to intelligent media and learning workflows. Beyond transcription or accessibility, Verbit provides actionable intelligence: smart summaries, analytics, search, knowledge extraction, legal-deposition insights and more.

With more than 3,000 global customers relying on Verbit- including top law firms, universities, enterprises and media organizations- we’re building the future of how speech data is processed, understood and used.

We’re a group of:

• Tech-savvy individuals who are always open to more growth and learning opportunities
• Adaptable and flexible people who thrive in a fast-paced, startup environment
• Creative minds who rethink and question how to outperform past results
• Effective communicators who can promote and represent Verbit’s tech and brand