Senior Director of Engineering

City of New York•New York, NY

8d•$215,000 - $235,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The New York City Campaign Finance Board seeks a Senior Director of Engineering to lead the engineering function that builds and runs the technology behind New York City's public matching funds program, the Voter Guide, and the agency's campaign finance disclosure and compliance systems. This role shapes how campaign finance, voter education, and public matching funds are built for the next decade of New York elections. The platforms powering every city election are undergoing a multi-year modernization from legacy .NET onto cloud-native Python infrastructure, targeting completion in 2027. This senior leadership role owns the multi-year technical roadmap end-to-end, supervising software development, quality assurance, and Salesforce engineering, with data engineering operating as an agency-wide shared platform service. Within 6 to 12 months of hire, the role expands to include direct oversight of Infrastructure and Cybersecurity, consolidating engineering accountability across the agency's technical stack. This is a turnaround leadership role focused on building baseline engineering discipline, developing managerial capability, and delivering reliable services through active transformation. It is also a build role, standing up a Salesforce engineering function from scratch, maturing a data engineering operation, and reskilling a technical workforce. The role is designed for an engineering leader earlier in their leadership career with the technical credibility to earn trust and the appetite to build practices where they do not yet exist.

Requirements

Software development lifecycle, DevOps, and CI/CD practices applied to enterprise-scale systems.
Building, integrating, and operating AI/ML use cases in production as software delivery, and technical model evaluation (capability, accuracy, latency, cost, and technical security).
Modern data architecture build, including data lakehouse construction, ETL/ELT pipelines, and real-time API integrations, sufficient to oversee delivery.
Enterprise network architecture, cloud infrastructure, and the relationship between infrastructure decisions and application engineering outcomes.
Building a technical function from scratch (Salesforce, data engineering), including team structure, hiring plan, and operating model.
Supervising and developing engineering managers and directors, including building managerial capability in technical leaders who have functioned primarily as individual contributors, with genuine investment in growing technical leaders into effective managers and patience for development timelines.
Establishing, documenting, and enforcing engineering standards across teams previously operating without consistent practice.
Providing senior technical oversight of vendor-built data infrastructure, with the depth to evaluate architectural soundness rather than rely on vendor self-reporting.
Evaluating vendor-built technology with sufficient depth to identify architectural or quality concerns before they become operational failures.
Diagnosing root causes across technical debt, organizational structure, and people capability simultaneously, distinguishing between individual capability gaps and systemic process gaps.
Partnering with product, data, project management, design, and executive leadership at a peer level, building trust and alignment across functions.
Communicating technical decisions, tradeoffs, and risks to non-technical executive audiences in language that resonates with decision-makers.
Build and operate a data-platform function as an agency-wide shared service, with consumers and governance standards outside the engineering org.
Lead organizational change, including moving teams from waterfall or ad hoc practices to disciplined agile delivery.
Maintain momentum through multi-year modernization initiatives, with comfort operating in environments where processes do not yet exist and willingness to adjust approach based on what emerges during implementation.
Builds trust and alignment across product, data, project management, design, and non-technical executive audiences; treats peer partners (including external governance bodies) as collaborators rather than obstacles.
Demonstrates technical credibility with engineering teams, earning trust through informed judgment rather than positional authority.
Demonstrates a partnership orientation across the standards/build seam, treating data governance standards owned outside the engineering chain as a peer authority rather than a constraint to negotiate around.
Demonstrates a security-first orientation, treating compliance and risk management as foundational rather than supplementary.
Demonstrates a turnaround disposition, comfortable building practices that do not yet exist and managing through resistance from staff accustomed to prior ways of working.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a closely related field (master's preferred).
15+ years of progressive software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in engineering leadership roles.
Demonstrated experience building and operating data engineering functions as shared platform services.
Hands-on experience with Python-based development, cloud-native architecture (AWS/Azure/GCP), and modern CI/CD tooling.
Experience modernizing legacy systems and managing technical debt at scale.
Public-sector, civic tech, or highly regulated industry leadership experience.

Responsibilities

Build, supervise and mentor a leadership team across engineering functions (software development, quality assurance, Salesforce engineering, data engineering, and infrastructure), establishing clear accountability and developing managerial capability within the engineering organization.
Work with CFB leadership and internal partners to implement baseline people management practices, including hiring, performance management, career development, feedback, evaluation and retention strategies that attract and retain engineering talent in the public sector.
Foster an engineering culture that prioritizes collaborative problem-solving, knowledge-sharing, accountability, and continuous improvement across technical teams and agency-wide partnerships.
In partnership with the Senior Director of Product, work with CFB leadership and internal partners to expand knowledge, engagement and comfort with the software development lifecycle, agile processes and product thinking, to ensure a balanced mixture of maintenance and stability, quality-of-life improvements and ambitious experimentation and innovation.
Set and track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Develop and maintain a multiyear technical roadmap that aligns engineering work with the agency's product roadmap, digital priorities, and modernization goals.
Establish, document, and enforce engineering standards, including coding standards, branching strategy, security policies, compliance requirements, and architecture review practices.
Evaluate emerging technologies (including cloud-based solutions, open-source tools, and AI applications) and recommend adoption decisions appropriate to public-sector cost, risk, and capability constraints.
Develop and maintain a standard tracking system and reporting standards to track delivery flow, predictability, quality, and end-to-end traceability.
Lead the agency's software development and quality assurance functions, including supervision of engineering managers.
Own the software development lifecycle, DevOps, and CI/CD pipelines. Drive agile delivery practices in coordination with product leadership.
Own the technical implementation of AI use cases (building, integrating, and operating models in production as software delivery) and the technical evaluation of whether a model performs against the data provided (capability, accuracy, latency, cost, and technical security).
Manage technical debt proactively and make sound architecture decisions.
Provide senior-level oversight of the agency's IT infrastructure and cybersecurity functions, including network architecture, cloud infrastructure, end-user computing, helpdesk operations, and the agency's cybersecurity posture.
Ensure alignment with citywide IT standards (NYC Office of Technology and Innovation) and cybersecurity requirements (NYC Cyber Command).
Lead disaster readiness and business continuity planning.
Oversee the agency's data engineering build-and-operations function, delivering secure, scalable data infrastructure to enterprise governance standards.
Oversee design, construction, and operation of modern data architecture (the data lakehouse, real-time API integrations, and ETL/ELT pipelines).
Provide senior technical oversight of major data-architecture build decisions, including evaluating vendor-built data infrastructure for soundness and scalability.
Operate the function as an agency-wide shared platform service serving distributed analytics and research teams.
Build, from the ground up, an in-house Salesforce engineering function responsible for the codebase, configurations, documentation, and infrastructure of the agency's Salesforce instances.
Hire a Director of Salesforce Engineering and establish team structure, processes, and standards.
Establish in-house procedures for bug fixes, service requests, and feature enhancements.
Ensure Salesforce use aligns with NYC Cyber Command, internal security policy, and records retention requirements.
Provide senior technical oversight of strategic technology vendors, with the depth required to evaluate what is being built rather than relying on vendor self-reporting.
Hold vendors accountable for scope, quality, and delivery commitments.
Lead the agency's technical workforce development strategy, including reskilling programs and structured, time-bound knowledge transfer from vendors to internal staff.
Manage technical hiring across engineering teams, in coordination with the agency's hiring prioritization plan.