Director, Product Engineering

JOB SUMMARY (added January 2024)

The Director of Product Engineering oversees a product development division, scoped to a large component of the technology strategy or product line of the business. They are responsible for designing, developing, implementing, and supporting applications, systems, and products required to achieve the company's business objectives.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES

Strategy and Innovation

• Actively participates with product management and engineering leadership to develop / evolve product strategy and achieve customers’ goals
• Develops and executes on the technology strategy that will enable the success of the product strategy
• Drive and enable teams to establish and radiate progress toward key metrics to measure success—i.e.  key performance indicators (KPIs), objectives and key results (OKRs)
• Leverage design thinking to derive empathy and insights that improve product performance.
• Work with partners, customers, and internal stakeholders to execute the build-measure-learn lean startup loop to incrementally improve products from idea to the product-market fit and scaling stages

Leadership & Communication

• Manage organizational structure, and functional roles and responsibilities for the product engineering teams
• Lead and inspire product teams that are responsible for the end-to-end product development lifecycle (PDLC).  This includes strategy, discovery, delivery, and measurement
• Reinforce a strong product culture by balancing the needs of product management, design, engineering, and architecture to optimize the PDLC, and learning by experimentation
• Partner with leadership team to achieve organizational buy-in on key cross-product efforts
• Identify and remove process and organizational bottlenecks
• Manage an organizational and product technology budget
• Conduct reviews, provide career guidance and develop associates and teams through recruiting, training, and ongoing coaching
• Influence others and navigate sensitive situations while maintaining positive relationships
• Interact with internal and/or external leaders, including senior management

Delivery and Execution

• Direct multiple cross-functional teams to deliver product releases that achieve business objectives while meeting quality and time-to-market expectations
• Support discovery activities for product teams — e.g., providing tools, clearing blockers, enabling validation with users, and securing funding for related work
• Drive the involvement of all team members in idea generation
• Ensuring that we build the right thing that has measures to drive the value of the business
• Enable continuous and rapid testing & learning to systematically identify and mitigate risks
• Ensure that product managers and delivery managers are executing against key business initiatives
• Manage relationships with vendors or other enterprise services needed to operate and deliver for your area of focus
• Provide engineering leadership to ensure security, privacy, and integrity of customer and user data
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement and root cause problem solving to identify and drive improvements in process and operations
• Ensure Agile discipline around releasing “thin slices” based on rigorous prioritization as understood through discovery
• Establishes engineering best practices (i.e TDD, paired programming, clean code, etc) for teams, provides coaching, drive continuous improvement, and ensures that teams are meeting best practices
• Establishes a culture of devops, secops, and finops across their engineering organization

Measurement

• Work with leadership to define/refine meaningful metrics to track team effectiveness and improvement
• Direct the collection and ongoing management of a portfolio of performance metrics to communicate product, platform, and ecosystem health
• Foster a culture of data-driven decision making, by working with stakeholders and product teams to refine strategy based on performance metrics

KNOWLEDGE & REQUIREMENTS

What is expected of you and others at this level

• Manages department operations and leads Delivery Managers, and senior technical individual contributors.
• Participates in the development of policies and procedures to achieve organizational goals
• Ensures employees operate within guidelines
• Decisions have a medium-term impact on work processes, outcomes and customers
• Interacts with subordinates, peers, customers, and suppliers at various management levels; may interact with senior management
• Interactions normally involve resolution of issues related to operations and/or projects
• Gains consensus from various parties involved

EDUCATION & EXPERIENCE REQUIREMENTS

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field or equivalent work experience.
• 10 years experience in related field preferred.
• Significant experience with custom software development strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated ability to manage large team performance, career and professional development.
• Demonstrated ability to understand business processes, set product direction and oversee successful PDLC.
• Strong skills in stakeholder management and internal evangelism of product principles.
• Track record of identifying, recruiting, and retaining talent.
• Demonstrated knowledge of agile software development techniques and fluency in software languages, APIs, hardware/software platforms, and conceptual knowledge of architecture standards.
• Demonstrated problem solving ability that drives operational excellence.
• Travel Requirements: Domestic and/or International, up to 25%

What’s In It For You?

• Medical, Dental and Vision Plans
• Voluntary Benefits
• HSA & FSA
• Fertility & Family Planning Benefits
• Paid Parental Leave
• Adoption Assistance Program
• Employee Resource Groups
• Flex PTO for Exempt Associates & up to 15 PTO days in first year of employment for non-exempt associates
• 11 Paid Holidays
• Corporate Wellness Program
• 401k Employer Match & Roth Option Available – immediate eligibility