AVP, Engineering & Technical Product Owner

Athene • West Des Moines, IA

3d

About The Position

Vitera is transforming how retirement savings become reliable lifetime income. We bring together technology, product design, and some of the largest organizations in financial services to make guaranteed lifetime income more accessible within defined contribution plans. As part of the broader Athene and Apollo ecosystem, Vitera combines the speed, ownership, and creativity of a growing technology business with the scale, resources, and market reach of leading financial services organizations. As AVP, Engineering & Technical Product Owner, you will lead Vitera's Software Engineering and QA teams while shaping the architecture, technical direction, and delivery of the applications powering our business, including the VDX data exchange platform and Pricing Engine. Reporting directly to the CTO, this is a highly visible, hands-on leadership opportunity for someone who can move comfortably between people leadership, architecture, product ownership, and software engineering—and who is excited to use AI to rethink how technology teams build and deliver.

Requirements

• 8+ years of relevant software development, engineering, or technology experience; including 4+ years of formal or informal leadership experience, with demonstrated success developing technical talent and leading teams responsible for production technology platforms, preferred.
• Deep software engineering expertise with demonstrated experience owning technical architecture and design for production platforms, along with the ability and willingness to contribute technically when the situation calls for it.
• Experience leading Agile product and engineering delivery, including backlog management, roadmapping, requirements refinement, release management, and cross-functional prioritization.
• Experience with cloud platforms and modern engineering practices—AWS preferred—including CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, development and QA automation, and contemporary engineering tooling; experience with tools such as Atlassian, GitHub, Terraform, and AI coding assistants is valuable.
• Strong critical thinking, communication, and stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to translate between technical and executive audiences, make sound decisions in ambiguity, challenge existing approaches, and turn ideas into action.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience.

Nice To Haves

• Financial services, insurance, retirement, or fintech experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead, empower, and develop the engineering organization, including Software Engineering and QA, creating an inclusive, high-accountability environment where people have ownership, experiment thoughtfully, grow their capabilities, and deliver meaningful business outcomes.
• Own technical architecture and engineering direction across Vitera's application portfolio, making sound decisions on platform design, technology selection, engineering standards, AWS infrastructure, CI/CD, scalability, security, and technical debt.
• Drive end-to-end product and engineering delivery, owning the backlog and SDLC from requirements and architecture through development, testing, release, and production deployment while partnering with the CTO and business stakeholders to shape the technology roadmap.
• Remain meaningfully hands-on, contributing code and technical solutions when needed while helping the team solve complex problems, move quickly through ambiguity, and continuously improve engineering practices.
• Accelerate AI-enabled engineering, championing responsible use of AI-assisted development, code review, testing and QA automation, bug detection, and operational monitoring while helping the broader Vitera organization identify high-value applications of AI.
• Act like an owner for technology performance and risk, communicating delivery status, critical paths, and risks to Vitera leadership while supporting SOC 2 and SDLC governance, release management, vendor coordination, and technology budget planning.

Benefits

• We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, veteran status or any other status protected by federal, state or local law.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior