Senior Director, Product Engineering

Senior Director, Product Engineering

Location:

Remote – USA, Canada

Reports to:

SVP, Engineering

Vacancy:
New

Leads the Product Engineering organization at JD Power, accountable for the people, practices, and delivery of engineering across our product portfolios. Brought in to align engineering execution across portfolios and establish a durable operating model that scales as the business and product strategy evolve.

As Senior Director, you will drive the engineering organization's delivery of innovative, scalable, and secure products across multiple portfolios. Your leadership will shape the velocity, quality, and strategic direction of engineering teams—accelerating time‑to‑market while raising the bar on technical excellence and operational resilience.

• Manage, level, and develop the leadership bench across product portfolios.
• Own the hiring plan for Product Engineering and partner with Talent Acquisition on sourcing, leveling, and selection.
• Set performance expectations, manage underperformance, and run calibration across the organization.
• Define and communicate the org structure, role definitions, and career paths for engineers and engineering managers.
• Own engagement outcomes for the Product Engineering organization.

• Establish and enforce a consistent engineering operating model across portfolios—planning cadence, delivery commitments, release practices, code review standards, and incident response.
• Partner with Product leadership on portfolio prioritization, capacity planning, and roadmap commitments.
• Own engineering delivery against committed roadmaps and report progress to executive leadership.
• Drive continuous improvement on DORA and other metrics for in-scope products.

• Own the quality and reliability posture of in-scope products in production—defect rates, customer-impacting incidents, and SLAs.
• Establish and report on a small set of quality and reliability metrics that tie to customer outcomes.
• Partner with Dev Ops, Security, and Data Engineering on shared platform contracts that product engineering depends on.

• Set technical direction for product engineering in coordination with architecture and peer engineering leaders.
• Approve significant architecture and technology decisions within the Product Engineering organization.
• Sponsor engineering investments—platform consolidation, modernization, AI-enabled developer workflows—that improve productivity and product quality.
• Ensure appropriate technical depth at the director level; expect directors to own architectural review for their portfolios.

• Represent Product Engineering to the executive team, customers, and when relevant, the board.
• Own the Product Engineering budget, including headcount, vendors, and contractors.
• Communicate clearly and frequently with non-engineering stakeholders on commitments, risks, and trade-offs.

• Approve engineering hires (IC and management) within the approved headcount plan.
• Final approver on engineering operating model, delivery practices, and quality standards across product portfolios.
• Approve Product Engineering vendor contracts and tooling decisions up to [$X] without escalation.
• Serve as sponsor/approver on cross-portfolio architecture decisions originating within Product Engineering.

• 15+ years in software engineering, with at least 8 years managing engineers and at least 5 years managing managers.
• Direct experience leading an engineering organization of 75+ people, including a director or senior‑director leadership bench.
• Demonstrated turnaround or stabilization experience—hired an underperforming or destabilized engineering org and improved delivery, quality, and team health with quantifiable results.
• Track record of shipping data and analytics products at scale—SaaS analytics, insights, data-heavy enterprise products, or similar.
• Built and enforced a consistent engineering operating model across multiple product lines or business units.
• Strong executive presence; effective communicator with…