Senior Director of Engineering (Frontend)

About ThoughtSpot

ThoughtSpot's next-generation Search & AI-driven analytics platform lets business users run natural language queries across billions of rows of data and receive AI-generated insights in real time. Our platform is built for any business user, yet powerful enough for the most demanding enterprise environments—without compromising speed, security, or governance.

We were co-founded by engineers who built search and infrastructure at Google, database systems at Microsoft, and enterprise software at Oracle. Diversity isn't a box we check—it's the heart of Selfless Excellence, the core value that drives how we build, ship, and lead.

The Role

ThoughtSpot is looking for a bold, technically fearless Senior Director of Engineering to lead the Connected Insights track — the heart of ThoughtSpot's visualization, navigation, and frontend experience. This track spans three high-impact teams:

FE Infra

The foundational layer powering ThoughtSpot's frontend — module federation, Client caching, build systems, performance, and developer platform tooling.

Charts

The rendering engine for ThoughtSpot's rich visualization library — from core charting primitives to agent-driven chart configuration via the Answer API.

Liveboard

The primary interactive canvas in ThoughtSpot — architecture, presentation & interactivity, agent integration, and the AI-driven Liveboard experience.

This is a pivotal moment for the Connected Insights track. The frontend tech stack is deep and modern — React, Client, module federation, complex state management — and the architecture is ready for a thoughtful rethink. We need someone who will question assumptions, challenge the status quo, and bring the curiosity and technical horsepower to redesign for the next era of ThoughtSpot's scale and AI-first product vision.

Equally important: the bug backlog is real. This leader must approach quality differently — not just as a process checkbox, but as an engineering culture and operational discipline that the team owns and takes pride in.

What You'll Do

Lead & Scale Three FE-Heavy Teams

• Own the engineering roadmap, headcount, and technical vision for FE Infra, Charts, and Liveboard — three teams with deep React and TypeScript DNA.
• Be an active presence in architecture forums and design reviews — not just signing off, but shaping technical direction hands-on.
• Build and develop engineering managers and senior ICs into the next generation of ThoughtSpot leaders.
• Hire relentlessly for intellectual curiosity, ownership mindset, and frontend depth.

Rethink the Architecture

• Audit the current architecture across module federation, Client cache design, state management, rendering performance, and component system — and build a compelling vision for what comes next.
• Lead the move to a scalable, maintainable, and AI-ready frontend foundation that can power ThoughtSpot's Spotter, SpotterViz, and next-generation Liveboard experiences.
• Drive architectural decisions with first-principles thinking, not convention — question every assumption about how the frontend is structured today.
• Define and own the technical north star for frontend infrastructure, charting capabilities, and interactive Liveboard experiences.

Attack the Bug Backlog & Raise the Quality Bar

• Treat the bug backlog as a cultural and operational challenge, not just a ticket queue — instill a quality-first mindset across all three teams.
• Build operational systems (on-call hygiene, bug SLAs, regression prevention, automated testing frameworks) that structurally reduce bug accumulation.
• Define quality metrics that the teams live by — not just defect counts, but incident response time, customer-impacting regressions, and release reliability.
• Partner with customer success and support to close the loop between customer-facing bugs and engineering accountability.

Drive Cross-Functional Impact

• Work tightly with Product, Design, and the AI/Spotter teams to ensure the frontend platform keeps pace with an increasingly AI-native product surface.
• Represent the Connected Insights track in R&D staff reviews, quarterly planning, and executive discussions with clarity, data, and conviction.
• Be the connective tissue between what customers experience in the UI and what engineering builds — customer obsession must be visible in every architectural and process decision.

What You Bring

Non-Negotiables

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5+ years in senior engineering leadership (Director level or above) managing multiple teams.
• Deep hands-on frontend engineering background — you've written production React, understand Client and GraphQL caching patterns, module federation, and the modern JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystem at scale.
• Proven track record of architectural reinvention — you've led a team through a meaningful frontend re-architecture, not just incremental improvement.
• Track record of raising quality standards in a team with a meaningful bug backlog — you know how to make this cultural, not just procedural.
• Excellent judgment in hiring, developing, and retaining senior IC and EM talent.
• Strong communication and cross-functional influence — comfortable presenting to executive leadership and working shoulder-to-shoulder with product and design.

Strongly Valued

• Experience building or scaling visualization/charting systems — chart rendering performance, SVG/Canvas tradeoffs, animation, responsive design at scale.
• Familiarity with AI-integrated product surfaces — building frontend systems that adapt to and expose LLM/NLP capabilities to end users.
• Experience in enterprise SaaS environments with multi-tenancy, embedded analytics (SDK, iframe, component embedding), and stringent performance/security requirements.
• Prior experience working in geographically distributed teams, particularly with India-based engineering centers.
• Exposure to backend services and data pipelines — enough to have informed conversations with backend counterparts and own end-to-end product quality.

Who You Are

Architecturally Curious: The moment you join, you start asking "why does this work this way?" You don't accept current patterns as gospel. You pull threads, read the code, sit with engineers, and form your own view — then share it constructively.

Operationally Sharp: You know that great engineering teams don't just ship features — they own what they ship. On-call, bug SLAs, incident retrospectives, and regression testing aren't overhead to you; they're signals of team health.

A Go-Getter, Not a Delegator: You can delegate well — but you also roll up your sleeves. You debug a customer issue yourself when needed. You write the doc. You pair with an engineer who's stuck. You're credible because you do the work.

An Exceptional Talent Magnet: You have a sixth sense for great engineers. You've built teams that others want to join. You make your reports better engineers and better leaders.

A Builder with Strong Opinions: You have a point of view on frontend architecture, and you're willing to defend it — while staying genuinely open to being wrong. You move fast, you're decisive, but you're not dogmatic.

Why This Role, Why Now

ThoughtSpot is at an inflection point. Spotter, our AI analyst, is redefining how business users interact with data — and the Connected Insights track is the product surface they see and touch every time. The Liveboard is evolving from a static dashboard canvas to an AI-driven, interactive analytical workspace. Charts are being exposed as agent-callable skills. FE Infra is the connective tissue holding it all together.

This is a rare opportunity to join as the engineering owner of the most user-facing part of a category-leading analytics platform — with the freedom and mandate to rethink it from the ground up.

If you're the kind of leader who gets excited by hard architectural questions, high standards, and the challenge of transforming a team — this is the role for you.