Associate Director, Engineering & Platform Product

OneMain Financial•Evansville, IN

About The Position

This role is responsible for leading a team within a department and is accountable for that team’s staffing, resourcing, talent development and budget. This role interfaces with the business on topics related to delivery. The Associate Director, Engineering & Platform Product will focus approximately 60% on engineering team leadership and 40% on platform product management. The role requires direct people leadership, including hiring, performance management, coaching, and career development. The individual will hold delivery accountability for team commitments, quality, and operational health, and partner with senior engineering leaders on shared staffing decisions. A key responsibility is driving efficiency through the responsible use of AI tools to improve throughput and quality without increasing headcount. On the product management side, the role involves owning and maintaining the product backlog, translating business objectives into a product roadmap, and serving as the point of accountability between business stakeholders and engineering delivery. The role also requires defining and reporting on product success measures and representing Platform priorities in cross-organizational discussions.

Requirements

Demonstrated experience leading engineering teams as a people manager, including hiring, performance management, and career development.
Track record of delivery accountability for team commitments, quality, and operational health.
Experience owning or materially shaping a prioritized backlog or roadmap, including intake and refinement.
Ability to translate business objectives into sequenced work with clear outcomes and acceptance criteria.
Proven effectiveness as a single point of accountability between business stakeholders and engineering delivery.
Evidence of using AI or automation tooling to improve delivery efficiency, with judgment about where it genuinely helps and where it introduces risk.
Comfort operating in a shared-staffing model where engineers are mobilized across initiatives by business need and technical fit.
Judgment to escalate enterprise-level trade-offs rather than absorb them, and to make scope and sequence calls transparently.

Nice To Haves

Formal product management experience in a digital or customer-facing product domain.
Familiarity with platform and cloud engineering environments, including AWS.
Experience working alongside a managed-services or vendor engagement model.
Experience developing emerging leaders identified through a succession or talent-review process.

Responsibilities

Provide direct people leadership for assigned engineering teams: hiring, performance management, coaching, and career development.
Hold delivery accountability for team commitments, quality, and operational health.
Partner with senior engineering leaders on shared staffing decisions, mobilizing talent across platform initiatives based on business need and technical fit.
Maintain clear administrative reporting lines while enabling flexible project assignment.
Contribute to development plans for emerging talent identified in the succession model.
Drive efficiency across the engineering and product workflow by identifying, evaluating, and scaling the responsible use of AI tools — raising throughput and quality without increasing headcount, establishing standards for appropriate and secure use, and building team capability so adoption holds.
Own and maintain the product backlog for the Platform engineering teams, including intake, refinement, and prioritization.
Translate business objectives into a sequenced Product roadmap with clear outcomes and acceptance criteria.
Serve as the single point of accountability between Platform business stakeholders and engineering delivery.
Define and report on product success measures; drive trade-off decisions on scope, sequence, and technical investment.
Represent Platform priorities in cross-organizational capacity and staffing discussions.
Leads a team of varying levels and is accountable for decision-making of daily activities, ensuring team execution and removing blockers.
Produces accurate estimates and provides coaching to team members.
Can deliver tough messages, handle disagreement, and address difficult questions to a non-managerial audience with back-up support from a more senior manager — effective downward communication skills.
Articulate complex technical concepts in a clear, concise manner that is easily understandable by technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Capable of leading a team through unfamiliar situations.
Serves as change champion for new initiatives.
Learns quickly when faced with new problems in own area of work; understands and synthesizes more complex, broader problems.
Sometimes proactively experiments to find solutions; tolerates uncertainty.
Usually views own and others’ successes and mistakes as learning opportunities.
Aligns skill sets appropriately to the problem to enable better problem solving.
Helps define problems in collaboration with other stakeholders before moving into solution-generation.
Identifies possible pitfalls in various solutions.
Works with the team to set short-range goals; provides direction and responsibilities.
Tries to match team members’ skills and interests to work.
Tracks work status, addresses issues, and provides guidance.
Guides and mentors team members by providing feedback and coaching, especially during challenging situations.
Encourages people to challenge themselves and helps others stretch their capabilities.