Sr. Director, Software Engineering

At Lifetouch (part of the Shutterfly family of brands), we believe there is extraordinary power in the self-expression. Built on the tradition of “Picture Day”, Lifetouch has captured the unique personalities of children and families for more than 90 years.

* This role is based in our Eden Prairie, MN office and requires regular onsite collaboration.

Lifetouch is seeking a results-oriented Senior Director of Engineering to lead software development, quality engineering, and the operating model that enables teams to deliver high-quality software quickly, predictably, and efficiently. This leader will combine strong people leadership with disciplined engineering operations and pragmatic Agile practices across customer-facing and internal platforms.

The role is accountable for translating business and product priorities into executable plans, improving delivery flow, strengthening engineering standards, and ensuring reliable day-to-day operations. The Senior Director will help Lifetouch modernize its engineering practices, expand automation and AI-assisted development, improve eCommerce and customer experiences, and increase product development capacity while supporting a complex portfolio of business-critical systems.

Primary Mission: Build an engineering organization that delivers meaningful business outcomes with speed, quality, accountability, and operational discipline.

Engineering Leadership

• Lead engineering teams supporting customer-facing products, business applications, integrations, shared services, and platform operations.
• Build, develop, and mentor engineering managers, technical leaders, and senior engineers while driving succession planning and career development.
• Foster a culture of accountability, ownership, inclusion, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Align organizational structure, skills, capacity, and partner resources with business priorities.
• Serve as the operational leader for Engineering, overseeing systems, processes, metrics, and a team of 6-10 direct reports, including Engineering Managers and QE, DBA, and L2 Support leaders.
• Communicate commitments, risks, tradeoffs, and outcomes to executive leadership while building high-performing teams.

Strategic Planning & Execution:

• Lead annual and quarterly planning, including capacity planning, resource allocation, dependency management, and roadmap execution.
• Establish operating mechanisms and accountability frameworks that provide visibility into performance, risks, organizational health, and delivery outcomes.
• Partner closely with Product Management to align engineering investments with company priorities.

Operational Excellence & Delivery:

• Own engineering KPIs, scorecards, and dashboards focused on quality, throughput, predictability, reliability, and business outcomes.
• Drive delivery performance, release predictability, and continuous improvement of key metrics, including Lead Time, Cycle Time, WIP, MTTR, and roadmap attainment.
• Proactively identify and mitigate risks, dependencies, and execution challenges.
• Lead distributed teams and strategic partners to maximize productivity, quality, and cost effectiveness.
• Partner across Network Engineering, Systems Engineering, Security, Operations, Infrastructure, SRE, Support, Finance, and Product teams to ensure platform reliability, seasonal readiness, and operational success.
• Lead incident management, operational reviews, post-incident learning, and efforts to improve resiliency, scalability, performance, monitoring, and automation.

Agile & Engineering Excellence:

• Establish and champion Agile delivery best practices, including planning, backlog management, estimation, retrospectives, and release management.
• Strengthen software engineering standards, observability, security, operational readiness, developer experience, and automation.
• Partner with Quality Engineering to expand automated testing and reduce manual effort.
• Promote continuous improvement, learning, experimentation, and outcome-based delivery.

AI-Enabled Engineering:

• Drive practical adoption of AI to improve software development, defect detection, root cause analysis, workflow automation, knowledge management, documentation, and developer productivity.
• Ensure AI solutions increase throughput, quality, and efficiency while maintaining appropriate governance and security standards.

Cross-Functional Leadership:

• Partner with Product, UX, Architecture, Data, Security, Operations, Customer Experience, and Finance leaders.
• Facilitate decisions…