Vice President of Software Engineering

Role Summary:

Our retained Global client is seeking a Vice President of Software Engineering to lead and govern its enterprise software engineering organization across multiple platforms. This is a mission-critical executive role with full accountability for software strategy, delivery, governance, and modernization at scale.

This leader will sit at the intersection of business strategy and technical execution, serving as the senior-most authority for software engineering. The role carries significant executive visibility and influence and is responsible for aligning engineering execution with enterprise priorities while driving innovation, quality, and disciplined delivery across a complex, multi-product environment.

Key Responsibilities:

• Executive ownership of 5 major enterprise software platforms, including across Asia and Europe.
• Leadership of a global software engineering organization of 100 member team, including both Senior Directors and Directors.
• Solid-line reporting into senior executive leadership with regular CEO engagement and alignment on enterprise software governance and strategy.
• Define and execute a multi-year software engineering strategy aligned with business growth, customer experience, and operational efficiency.
• Establish enterprise-wide architectural vision, standards, and best practices to ensure scalability, security, and long-term value.
• Provide architectural leadership for cloud-native, distributed, and enterprise-scale systems.
• Evaluate and leverage emerging technologies, including AI, to drive competitive advantage.
• Lead enterprise-wide software engineering governance across all platforms, creating common processes, standard and operating models.
• Oversee planning, design, execution, and delivery of multiple enterprise software initiatives.
• Implement best practices across Agile, DevOps, CI/CD, testing, and release management.
• Ensure high standards of quality, security, compliance, and audit readiness.
• Define, manage and drive engineering KPIs tied to delivery velocity, quality, reliability, and user experience.
• Partner closely with product, hardware engineering, operations, sales, marketing, and customer-facing teams.
• Translate complex technical decisions into clear business outcomes for executive stakeholders.
• Ensure alignment between engineering execution, product roadmaps, and go-to-market priorities.
• Lead, scale, and develop senior engineering leaders and their organizations.
• Scale and evolve a high-performing, globally distributed engineering organization.
• Drive modernization initiatives, including migration from legacy systems to service-oriented and event-driven architectures.
• Establish global engineering operating models to maximize efficiency and delivery effectiveness.
• Foster a high-performance engineering culture grounded in accountability, innovation, and continuous improvement.
• Own engineering budgets, investment prioritization, and capacity planning.
• Balance innovation with operational stability while managing delivery and technical risk.

Core Competencies:

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field.
• Senior engineering leader (VP, Head of Engineering, or equivalent) with experience in enterprise software or platform organizations.
• 3 years of proven success leading and scaling large, enterprise-level global engineering teams (100 employees).
• Proven experience engaging directly with customers, including c-suite and executive-level, to inform product strategy, delivery, and strategy.
• Experience operating in complex, multi-platform, multi-region and multi-country environments.
• Deep expertise in cloud-native architectures (AWS, Azure, or GCP), distributed systems, modern SDLC practices and modern SaaS-specific development frameworks.
• Track record in scaling engineering processes using Agile and DevOps methodologies in high-growth environments.
• Strong executive presence and ability to influence at the highest levels.
• Up to 20% travel.