Director, Product Software Engineering

POSITION SUMMARY

The Architecture & Incubation leader brings extensive experience designing and developing modern software solutions. As an Architecture leader you need to understand how software works, but it is more important you understand customer needs, provide solutions to those problems, and influence the business outcomes the solutions produce. This role bridges the worlds of customer requirements, product management, and software development, helping to ensure the solution produces the desired business outcome while adhering to the state-of-the-art technical architecture, patterns, and practices. The leader has a deep passion for advocating for the customer experience, keeping products current, and designing with strong knowledge of modern architectural patterns and practices.

The leader will partner with other delivery leaders, collaborate closely with COE’s, Product Management, and the CTO to guide overall direction of the products. Guiding discussions and influencing outcomes are keys to success in this role.

RESPONSIBILITIES AND ACCOUNTABILITIES

• Strategic Leadership: Provide strategic leadership and direction for the product software engineering department, aligning it with overall business objectives in the context of a matrixed organization. Define and drive the product architecture evolution by identifying opportunities and driving the right choices.
• Tactical Guidance: Provide tactical guidance to other architects, development leads, and teams as needed to maintain the integrity of the product architecture and protect the customer experience.

• Effective Communication: Communicate effectively in a matrixed organization with senior management, peers, and subordinates to ensure alignment and collaboration that drives consensus and outcomes.
• Objective Development: Develop and define departmental objectives, strategies, and goals to help drive the success of software projects.
• Interpersonal Relationship Management: Establish and maintain positive interpersonal relationships within the department and with other stakeholders.
• Knowledge Utilization and Expertise: Stay updated with relevant knowledge, technologies, patterns, and best practices to drive innovation within the department and across the organization.
• Decision Making and Problem Solving: Make critical decisions and solve complex problems related to software product design, development, delivery, deployment, and team management.
• Team Development and Building: Develop and build high-performing teams of architects, fostering their growth, productivity, and efficacy.
• Work Planning and Prioritization: Organize, plan, and prioritize the department's work to ensure efficient use of resources and on-time delivery of outcomes.
• Coaching and Mentorship: Provide coaching and mentorship to team members, fostering their professional growth and development. Assist the teams in the product life cycle, with particular focus on maintaining alignment with the overall software architecture, providing the overall guidance of the department, and collecting insights for emerging architectures, patterns, and practices.

• Guidance and Direction: Provide guidance and direction to subordinates, ensuring they align with the department's vision. Investigate and propose next generation technologies to solve current and future technical challenges across the organization.

• Standards Compliance Evaluation: Evaluate information and software products to ensure compliance with industry standards.
• Security and Compliance: Provide guidance and recommendations on how to product development teams should comply with global information security policies in a way that common across products and minimizes accumulation of technical debt.
• Technical Debt: Manage the backlog of technical debt across the product portfolio. Work with Product Management to secure the needed capacity to keep technical debt load at acceptable levels defined by Wolters Kluwer’s technical debt remediation framework.

REQUIREMENTS AND QUALIFICATIONS

Job Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related engineering field, and relevant experience working within product software engineering.
• Minimum of 15+ years of experience as an architect in designing software products in the SaaS space, utilizing varied technology choices that are relevant to the problem it is addressing.
• Minimum of 10+ years working within product software engineering leading architects and teams at a leadership level
• Proven experience in designing Distributed Systems with emphasis on scalability, reliability, security, other non-functional requirements, and micro-services architectures.

Skills:

• Architectural pattern