Director of Production Engineering (Reliability Platform Engineering)

Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions - External•Durham, NC

About The Position

Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions is seeking a Director of Production Engineering to own the engineering systems that make reliability, performance, correctness, and release safety predictable across our global POS, edge, cloud, and middleware platform. This is a production engineering leadership role focused on distributed system correctness, resilience, and performance engineering. You will partner closely with existing SRE and Operations leaders, but your charter is to engineer prevention by building production readiness standards, automated release gates, and performance/resilience validation mechanisms that stop unsafe changes before they ship. As AI accelerates development velocity, the bottleneck shifts from writing code to verifying correctness, performance, and safe behavior under failure. This role builds the production engineering foundation that allows teams to move fast without degrading latency, throughput, or availability. What Success Looks Like Releases ship faster without increasing Sev-1 / Sev-2 incidents Incident recurrence drops measurably due to enforced learning and prevention Edge → store → cloud workflows behave safely under real failure conditions Reliability is engineered, automated, and enforced, not reactive Teams clearly understand what “safe to release” means — and pipelines enforce it Why This Role Matters As AI accelerates development velocity, reliability and verification become the limiting factor. This role ensures: Uptime is engineered, not reactive Development and QA operate at AI-enabled speed The platform scales safely without sacrificing correctness TGCS matches or exceeds best-in-class engineering organizations You will build the production engineering foundation that powers the next decade of global commerce innovation. Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions is a dynamic billion-dollar global company based in Research Triangle Park, NC, providing retail store solutions to your favorite brands. Have you ever been in a hurry and made use of the self-checkout at Lowe's Foods, earned fuel rewards at Kroger, or just paid for purchases at retailers such as Walmart, Michaels, Carrefour, The Gap, Calvin Klein, Boots, Cencosud, BJ's, or Costco? These are just a few examples of our in-store solutions and impressive customer base that made us the world's installed market share leader. The nature of retail is changing quickly, so if you share our 'Together Commerce' vision of a seamless two-way, participatory shopping experience, let's get together to drive the new economy.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
10–15+ years building production engineering capabilities for distributed software platforms, with direct accountability for production outcomes.
Demonstrated experience defining and enforcing production readiness standards and non-functional release gates that prevent unsafe changes from shipping.
Proven ability to lead formal root-cause / reliability analysis and ensure systemic fixes reduce recurrence.
Strong distributed systems fundamentals, including the ability to reason about:
Failure modes and degradation behavior
Dependency risk, retries, and backpressure
Consistency tradeoffs and correctness under failure
Experience partnering deeply with Architecture and Software Engineering to embed reliability guardrails into design reviews, CI/CD pipelines, and system standards.
Senior leadership experience building teams and influencing across large engineering organizations.

Nice To Haves

Retail POS, payments, edge devices, or store environments.
Designing reliability automation (release scoring, regression detection, incident pattern analysis).
Hybrid cloud + edge architectures; Kubernetes/AKS; modern observability platforms.
Leading reliability transformations in large, complex engineering organizations.

Responsibilities

Own non-functional release criteria and automated release gates for reliability, resilience, performance, and correctness across complex release trains.
Define and enforce Production Readiness Reviews (PRRs) and platform-wide engineering standards.
Establish objective, measurable “safe-to-release” signals consumed by CI/CD and release tooling.
Partner with Architects and Principal Engineers to define failure modes, degradation behavior, and system guardrails for distributed and eventually consistent workflows.
Ensure systems behave correctly during retries, partial outages, intermittent connectivity, degraded modes, and recovery.
Lead engineering initiatives that reduce risk of data loss, duplication, corruption, or inconsistent state across POS, middleware, and cloud services.
Lead blameless incident reviews using formal analysis methods.
Ensure corrective actions are engineered into systems, validated, tracked, and audited.
Institutionalize learning so failures do not reappear under new conditions or scale.
Own platform-level strategies for resilience, performance, and scalability validation.
Drive chaos, failover, load, stress, and soak testing focused on real failure modes, not synthetic demos.
Validate store-mode behavior, payment workflows, edge-device dependencies, and multi-service interactions.
Ensure high-fidelity telemetry (logs, metrics, traces, and business signals) that supports release gating, correctness verification, and diagnosis.
Drive instrumentation standards that allow teams to prove reliability outcomes with data.
Partner with Software Engineering, Architecture, Quality Engineering, Cloud Operations, and TPM/TPO teams.
Build and lead senior technical managers and staff-level engineers.
Set expectations for technical depth, ownership, and execution quality.