Director of Elections Product and Engineering

Associated Press•Washington, DC

10d•$190,000 - $210,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Associated Press seeks a Director of Elections Product and Engineering to lead the technology teams that drive AP Elections. This role is responsible for the tools used to count the vote, declare winners, and support AP’s role in American democracy. The Director will develop product strategy, translate it into executable technical plans, and manage the roadmap for consistent and successful delivery. The ideal candidate is a technology leader who can align products with customer needs, lead teams to meet immovable deadlines, and serve customers who are experts in U.S. politics and elections, as well as publishers and technology companies. This role involves leading software architects, engineers, and project managers who build data collection, storage, and delivery systems, and coordinating software development efforts across Elections Operations, Analytics, and News groups. It is a senior leadership role with a shared reporting line to AP’s Senior Director of Engineering, requiring the ability to foster a collaborative and inclusive culture, prioritize customer needs, and manage teams effectively. This is an administrative role based in Washington, D.C., requiring onsite presence at least three days per week.

Requirements

At least a decade of experience in development.
More than five years of experience in a leadership role.
Experience with elections data (preferred).
Experience with data delivery on deadline and maintaining systems/services with inflexible SLAs.
Exceptional communication skills, particularly with customers, engineering leads, and senior stakeholders.
Ability to inspire shared standards of technical excellence and influence work without direct reporting lines.
Ability to quickly develop an end-to-end understanding of a complex platform.
Focus on iteration for improvement rather than rearchitecting or starting from scratch.
Strong technical judgment and a clear point of view on platform and product evolution.
Proven ability to translate product direction to engineering leadership and delivery teams.
Strong cross-functional communication with multiple teams, driving toward a consistent vision.
Experience operating global, AWS-native production systems at global scale, with a strong understanding of multi-region and multi-availability zone architectures.
Experience with event-driven and streaming architectures for live data ingestion and publishing, including managed AWS services (Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, API Gateway, CloudFront, Kinesis, CloudWatch, SQS/SNS).
Experience with managed NoSQL data storage technologies (MongoDB Atlas) and graph-based access patterns (AWS AppSync, GraphQL).
Experience operating systems under extreme burst traffic and time-bound events.
Experience with automation, load, stress, and soak testing strategies aligned to real-world usage scenarios.
Developing, communicating, and managing SLAs for external customers.
Incident response coordination during live, high-stakes events.
Experience with API-focused product management, versioning, and compatibility strategies.

Nice To Haves

Experience with elections data.
Master's degree or Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field (or equivalent experience).
Familiarity with the mechanics of American elections.
Understanding of the demands of customers who expect perfect performance.
Belief that data is journalism.
Eagerness to carry AP’s history of excellence in elections reporting into the future.

Responsibilities

Develop and shape product roadmaps and investment plans in collaboration with the Vice President of AP Elections, prioritizing customer and user needs, aligning with revenue growth plans, and including robust testing, information security, and ease of use.
Establish and communicate a clear architectural view of AP’s elections platforms, detailing system connections, responsibilities, and the introduction of new capabilities.
Build and evolve best-in-class data collection, management, and delivery products with a focus on making AP Elections data accessible and usable for all customers, ensuring high quality, accessibility, performance, and usability.
Make strategic trade-offs between speed, reliability, feature development, and technical debt, especially under hard election deadlines, and define/track success metrics (data latency, accuracy, customer adoption, system reliability) to inform these decisions.
Build and develop high-performing, globally distributed engineering and project management teams, including internal staff and third-party partners.
Align Elections Technology, Operations, Analytics, and News groups around a shared product vision, unifying planning, development, quality control, deployment, and documentation processes across software engineering within the AP Elections business unit.
Strengthen engineering delivery through pragmatic agile practices, clear planning, and strong cross-team communication, and identify the optimal incorporation of AI tools and best practices to improve performance while mitigating risk.
Identify architectural bottlenecks and guide the evolution or replacement of platform components to enhance reliability, performance, security, scalability, and cost efficiency.