Director, Software Engineering

O.C. Tanner

35d

About The Position

O.C. Tanner is the global leader in software and services that improve workplace culture through meaningful employee experiences. Our Culture Cloud is a suite of apps designed to enhance the employee experience with strategic recognition, service awards, wellbeing, leadership, and events that help people thrive at work. Our Culture by Design approach provides expert services to organizations looking to create great workplaces. Our global team of 1,500 people hail from 58 countries and speak 62 languages. As programmers, researchers, designers, client professionals and craftspeople we create the tech, tools and awards that connect employees to purpose at thousands of companies. Join us as we help people all over the world thrive at work. Reporting to the VP of Global Software Engineering, you will serve as the Director of Software Engineering, a pivotal role shaping the future of our global product suite. You will lead high-performing teams responsible for building and scaling the services that power millions of users worldwide, while ensuring our platforms remain resilient, secure, and ready for innovation. This is not just a leadership position; it’s an opportunity to influence the technical direction of a global organization. You’ll collaborate with senior architects and engineering leaders to define roadmaps, modernize legacy systems, and champion architectural excellence. We’re looking for a leader who combines deep technical expertise with a passion for mentoring talent and fostering a culture of trust, accountability, and continuous improvement. If you thrive on solving complex challenges, shaping strategy, and enabling teams to deliver world-class software at scale, this role offers the chance to make a lasting impact, not only on our technology but on the experience of millions of users across the globe.

Requirements

Extensive Enterprise Engineering Experience: A substantive track record of writing and deploying enterprise-grade code in complex, distributed environments for 10+ years. This technical foundation is required to lead and mentor our senior-most engineers.
Operational Resilience: Experience managing 24/7 high-availability systems and a deep understanding of observability, monitoring, and automated self-healing infrastructure.
Security Mindset: A proactive approach to security, with experience integrating automated security scanning and compliance guardrails into the software development lifecycle.
Global Leadership and Trust: Proven experience developing trusted working relationships across diverse departments and global regions. You understand the nuances of leading and collaborating within distributed organizations.
Proven Management Leadership: Significant experience leading multiple teams and managing senior individual contributors. You know how to lead through influence and direct management alike.
Architectural Fluency: The ability to engage in and lead deep architectural conversations, moving from high-level strategy to granular technical implementation details.
Exceptional Communication: The ability to navigate complex technical arguments with empathy and clarity, ensuring alignment between engineering, architecture, and executive leadership.
Cloud and Tech Stack Expertise: Demonstrated experience with major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices. Deep familiarity with our evolving technology stack, including Postgres, Terraform, GraphQL, RDS, Spring Boot, JavaScript, TypeScript, ReactJS, Kubernetes, and Docker.

Responsibilities

Visionary Technical Leadership: Manage and mentor Software Engineering Managers, Staff Engineers and engineering teams. You will facilitate their growth, align their efforts with organizational goals, and foster a culture where technical excellence is the baseline.
Strategic Collaboration: Work closely with Principal Engineers and the VP of Enterprise Architecture to define and challenge our technical direction. Bring informed, persuasive insights to architectural debates, ensuring alignment between technical vision and business objectives.
Roadmap and Technical Debt: Partner with the VP of Global Software Engineering and the VP of Enterprise Architecture to define the Engineering Roadmap. You will balance the delivery of new features with the pragmatic necessity of modernizing legacy systems and systematically paying down technical debt.
Platform Strategy Awareness: Possess a strong understanding of platform strategy and the principles behind Developer Experience (DevEx). While you will not own DevEx directly, you are expected to advocate for and support initiatives that make tools intuitive, well-documented, and reduce cognitive load for application teams.
Incident Leadership: Act as a senior leader during critical system issues, guiding teams through resolution and leading the post-mortem process to drive long-term architectural resilience.
Cloud Stewardship: Partner with the VP of Global Software Engineering to manage cloud infrastructure costs, ensuring we build high-performance systems that are also fiscally responsible.
Cross-Functional Execution: Act as a strategic bridge between foundational services and other engineering and business units. You will lead the execution of a shared company vision by ensuring our technical foundation directly enables broader organizational objectives.
Global Relationship Management: Build and maintain trusted working relationships across the company and across all global regions. You will interact deeply with our international engineering talent, ensuring a unified culture of excellence regardless of geography.
AI Productivity: Lead your teams in the responsible adoption of AI-assisted development tools to increase velocity and improve the developer experience.

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