Engineering Director

Role Summary The Engineering Director is a senior technical delivery leadership role responsible for both the operational health of client delivery and the engineering rigor behind it. This role owns end-to-end delivery accountability for the assigned account while also holding the engineering organization to a measurable standard - performance, stability, observability, and AI-driven engineering practice - functioning as the single accountable point of contact for both delivery execution and technical health. This is not a hands-on architect or individual-contributor engineering role. Deep architecture and code-level ownership remain with existing technical leads. The Engineering Director's value is in ownership, accountability, governance, and the technical fluency to engage credibly with client engineering leadership - not in writing code. Key Responsibilities Delivery Leadership • Own end-to-end delivery accountability for the account: project deliverables, estimation, sprint and backlog health, resource planning. • Act as the checkpoint between new initiative requests and actual delivery capacity - ensuring no initiative converts from strategic discussion to a committed deadline without an accompanying resourcing and risk plan. • Own SOW and scope-change tracking; enforce change-management discipline across active workstreams. • Serve as the primary escalation point for delivery-level risk, coordinating across workstream leads rather than resolving everything personally. Engineering Rigor & Technical Governance • Own and report on application/website performance across the account (Core Web Vitals, page load, transaction latency). • Own platform stability posture: incident trends, RCA discipline and follow-through, disaster-recovery readiness, and closing single-point-of-failure gaps through documented backups and cross-training. • Establish and mature monitoring, alerting, and observability standards - component-level health visibility, not just aggregate dashboards. • Own DORA metrics tracking and improvement across engineering teams: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, mean time to recovery. • Drive AI-enabled SDLC adoption (code-assist tooling, auto-investigation, agentic workflows) with a clear, quantified delivered/in-progress/roadmap narrative. • Identify and drive AI-based solutions that solve concrete client business problems (e.g. pricing/promotion validation, process automation), partnering with client stakeholders to shape the roadmap. Client & Portfolio Leadership • Act as a credible, technically fluent counterpart to client engineering leadership (VP Engineering / CTO-level) in prioritization, roadmap, and trade-off conversations. • Build and maintain a proactive capacity and demand plan for the account - surge planning ahead of known peak periods, and a resourcing model that does not rely on ad hoc fractional allocation. • Contribute to standardizing engineering governance practices that can extend to additional accounts in the portfolio over time, once justified independently on each account. People Leadership & Organizational Development • Manage and develop a team of 50+ engineering and delivery professionals across the account/portfolio, including org structure, shift/location coverage planning, and workforce/hiring plans. • Own formal performance management for the team: review cycles, promotion recommendations, individual development plans, and retention/attrition management. • Mentor and grow the next layer of technical and delivery leadership, reducing single-point-of-failure dependency on any one individual. • Own the interface with third-party/vendor support teams (e.g. managed-service or L1/L2 partners) - escalation paths, validation ownership, and reporting expectations. Commercial & Executive Accountability • Own delivery accountability for $5M+ of engineering work - forecasting, staffing-cost management, and utilization/margin health for the account. • Own executive-level reporting (QBR-level) to both Bounteous and client leadership on delivery, engineering health, and financial performance. Required Qualifications • 14+ years in software engineering or technical delivery leadership, including 5+ years at Director level or equivalent. • Demonstrated ownership of both delivery outcomes and engineering/technical quality outcomes - not a pure project-management background. • Proven experience managing teams of 50+ engineering/delivery professionals, including formal performance management and career development. • Demonstrated ownership of $5M+ in engineering delivery value, including commercial/forecasting accountability. • Working knowledge of modern commerce/cloud platforms, observability tooling (e.g. Datadog, Grafana), CI/CD pipelines, and DORA metrics. • Experience driving AI-enabled engineering practices (SDLC tooling, agentic workflows) strongly preferred. • Excellent client-facing communication skills; demonstrated ability to operate as a peer-level partner to client VP/Director-level engineering stakeholders. • Experience in retail, e-commerce, or composable commerce platforms preferred.